A homebrew programmer is resurrecting the unfinished, unreleased Saturn game Sonic Xtreme — and it’s not an April Fools’ Day joke.
A person named Voxel on the SegaXtreme Discord server uploaded a YouTube video Thursday of his rendition of Sonic Xtreme. It shows a slick, new menu from which three platforming levels and a work-in-progress boss level can be launched.
The levels use original Sonic Xtreme assets that have been leaked to the public over the years.
Complete with fisheye view, the video of the homebrew — a playable build of which has not been released publicly yet — shows the Jade Gully and Crystal Frost levels, as well as a checkerboard-style test level shown in the original official trailer for Sonic Xtreme.
The video ends with a look at a stage that Voxel said will host a boss battle with Fang, the gun-toting weasel antagonist from a handful of ’90s Sonic games.
The game is running in the Kronos emulator in the video, but Voxel said the build can be run on original hardware, albeit with more slowdown.
Voxel said they’ve been working on this homebrew off and on in their spare timesince September last year, programming it with the Sega Graphics Library code used to make retail Saturn games.
A teaser trailer also was uploaded the same day with a title card promising levels “old and new.”
“Luckily, the engine’s quite developed enough to have other people make some nice, original content even right now,” – Voxel on the re-usability of his game engine.
Voxel’s effort is separate from a previous high-profile project to recreate Sega Xtreme by XL2, who abandoned that to work on his original Saturn homebrew first-person shooter Hellslave.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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