Watch out for that robot dragon, Sonic! Sega In most Sonic games, running into an enemy is a guaranteed way to lose your rings or a life, but in Spinball, it’s the only way to progress.
Along his journey, he’ll encounter bumper-style enemies, like worms, that will come out of nowhere. The way to find these emeralds is to send Sonic flying at reckless speeds. The aim, ostensibly, is to find two chaos emeralds amidst the various pipes, bumpers, flippers, and ramps. The first stage takes place in a toxic-sludge sewer world, with monsters lurking in an ocean of green goo. Sonic Spinball plays with some of the possibilities of virtual pinball while trying to keep its gameplay at least somewhat grounded. Pinball machines were often competition for games in arcades, so why not poach the competition? While video games at the time couldn’t offer the physical interactivity of a pinball table, they could do away with the rules of physics, creating impossible shots and challenges that helped differentiate it from a more traditional pinball experience. Video game pinball made a lot of sense at this time. In order to keep Sonic’s momentum going before the upcoming holiday shopping season while Japanese developers made Sonic 3, Sega decided to use the mostly-American Sega Technical Institute to spin-off (get it!?) the Casino Night Zone into its own game. When asked to explain the game’s success, Tom Kalinske, Sega’s CEO, explained that “first and foremost, Sonic 2 is the fastest and coolest game ever developed.”Ĭasino Night Zone was a big part of Kalinske’s argument. Backed by a $10 million advertising campaign, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was a smash hit in the 1992 holiday shopping season, moving 400,000 units in its first six days. While that was never the case, Sega still needed to keep up the momentum. The original Sonic the Hedgehog made such a mark on the industry in 1991 that the New York Times reported Sega “boasting that 1991 will be remembered in the world of video games as the year that Sonic the Hedgehog left Super Mario in the dust.” Skip ahead to around the 0:41 mark to see Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball in action on the Nintendo Switch.
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