Reader request: Sonic Spinball

It's pinball, but Sonic is spinning, do you get it?

This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I love a pinball game. Am I good at pinball? No. Does that stop me from enjoying myself? Well, that depends a lot on the table or virtual pinball game in question. Sonic Spinball is the kind of pinball game where I can enjoy it much more today in a world where emulation and save states exist, instead of in the terrifying one it released in, where you only had a few balls with which to complete an entire pinball video game that was intent on killing you in a variety of ways.

Calling Sonic Spinball a pinball game only tells half the story. It’s more like a pinball platformer: the story is that Sonic is trying to get to Dr. Robotnik inside of an island fortress of his, and that it just so happens to have a security system that resembles a pinball game inside of it, one so large that Sonic himself is the ball. So, you’ll do typical pinball stuff, launching Sonic off of flippers and into secret bonus pathways, bouncing off of security doors until you open them by hitting specific buttons around the “table,” but you’ll also do some more Sonic stuff, like timing some jumps, riding in a barrel over toxic waste, avoiding enemies that will absolutely kill you if they touch you, and so on. Pinball platformer! So much more descriptive than “action, pinball,” really, but no one pays me to make sense of genre listings on Wikipedia or Google, so I won’t.

The game certainly has its moments and quirks worth discussing, but more intriguing to me, at least upfront, is the story behind the game itself. It’s a very 1990s Sega story, for one, and those are basically a long lost treasure worth looking for at this point since Sega has thrived so much more as a third-party developer and publisher than they ever did when they were making business decisions about consoles and add-ons.

Make note of how there is no “Continue” or Stage Select, just a “Start” option.

The developer of Sonic Spinball is Sega Technical Institute, who had previously worked on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — it’s where Yuji Naka went after the original Sonic the Hedgehog was developed, after he had quit working for the Japanese side of the company. Having the Japanese developers work with the American ones was supposed to create the kinds of games no one else out there was making at the time — a blending of design philosophies — but things apparently did not work that way, according to a retrospective published by Retro Gamer that sadly does not seem to exist even on the Internet Archive any longer. We still have STI’s founder, Mark Cerny, saying there wouldn’t be cross-developed games between the Japanese and American Sonic teams any longer after how Sonic 2’s development went down, though, so it’s not as if there is a lack of evidence in general.

Sega Technical Institute didn’t lose the development of Sonic games despite the disagreements between key staff that made developing the sequel difficult, and in fact was working on Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as well as Sonic & Knuckles throughout 1993. This project, however, had its own constraints and setbacks that caused the two to be released separately instead of as one game, and it began its life looking a lot more like what Sonic 3D Blast would end up being a few years later than what the actual final product here was. Because of these problems and restarts that shifted the game from an isometric perspective and split it into two games after its conception as one, neither of Sonic 3 nor Sonic & Knuckles were going to be ready for the 1993 holiday season. Rather than just letting this go and featuring something besides Sonic in the lead-in to Christmas, Sega kind of panicked, and commissioned the American side of STI to develop another Sonic game, one that would be ready in time for the holidays. They had just nine months to conceive of something that wasn’t Sonic but could be, and then develop it: the actual development for what would become Sonic Spinball lasted for all of 61 days.

In order to actually hit this deadline and get away with doing the actual programming of the game in about two months’ time, STI used a different programming language than they typically did for the Genesis, switching from Assembly to C. While this did allow for the development of the game to increase to the necessary breakneck pace, it also created basically every technical issue that exists within Sonic Spinball, like the inconsistent frame rate and the near-constant slowdown.

Sonic can be eaten by that giant creature, or he can escape by jumping out of the way. If you aren’t in ball form and you touch an enemy, that’s the end of that life. Image credit: Retronauts

The game really does lack polish, to the point that so much more of the game makes sense when you realize how it was made. The art is just a little… off, as are the sound effects. Neither is bad, mind you, but it’s the kind of difference that could really only happen in the early 90s, when developers were flying a bit more by the seat of their pants than today, when it is pretty clear what established mascots like Mario and Sonic will look like in every context. It’s clearly a Sonic game in the Sonic universe, more so than like, Mario is Missing was for Mario, but it’s not quite what was seen or heard in the first two Sonic platforming games on the Genesis, either, nor was it like what was to come in Sonic 3 and its partner game. Even the game’s lead, Peter Morawiec, says he regrets that they didn’t have time to polish it up to make it all look and feel more like Sonic.

With all of that being said, though, what Morawiec and the team at STI managed on this accelerated timetable is still capable of being fun. It sold well, owing in part to its relative uniqueness and attachment to the Sonic name, and even its technical issues weren’t that significant in the grand scheme of things. The slowdown is almost ever-present, sure, but it’s actually more helpful than it is a hindrance, since Sonic Spinball lets you manipulate Sonic in midair, altering his trajectory or landing spot ever so slightly. More time to consider and tweak is often welcome, even if it’s slowing down the proceedings in the process.

The gameplay is pretty fun, since it’s clearly a blend between standard pinball play as well as tweaks that are there specifically because you are playing as a character from a series of platformers. Timing and angles are everything, as they are in actual pinball, and that goes for whether you’re using a flipper to aim Sonic a specific way, or if bursts of air are propelling Sonic, in ball form, into the air where he will have to perfectly time a bounce off of an enemy floating by in order to access another section of the “table.” Since you can manipulate Sonic a bit in midair, it’s not a perfect 1:1 with pinball by any means, but it’s also absolutely necessary that you master this ability, too, or else you’re never going to progress beyond the initial stage, which features “floors” covered in toxic sludge and also a giant aquatic creature will that eat you if you fall in the water or simply don’t move off of dry land fast enough.

You can’t see much of the “table” at one time — things aren’t as zoomed out here as they are in, say, Devil’s Crush on the Turbografx-16 — but there are arrows and lights that guide you as to where you’re supposed to be aiming Sonic or heading toward, so you also aren’t left entirely in the dark to experiment over and over again until you get it right. There is also a very helpful pinball screen up top, that not only shows you your score and lives but will flash messages and announcements just like on an actual pinball table.

Each stage ends with a boss fight, and these are basically mini puzzles. Consider the first one, which looks like a Dr. Robotnik scorpion dripping toxic waste from its tail. You can bounce around on top of the scorpion bot again and again, putting yourself at constant risk that you’ll fall off or touch the toxic waste, or you can figure out how to propel yourself at an angle that’ll see Sonic end up inside the arc of the boss’ tail: basically enclosed, and safe, and constantly bouncing on the top of the foe and the underside of its tail in order to hasten its demise.

The boss fight discussion is also probably as good a time as any to say that Sonic Spinball might not look exactly like the Sonic you’re used to, and the sound effects are a little off, too, but the music is as good as you expect from a Sonic game. I’m partial to the boss theme, myself:

It should be noted, too, that there was a music-related issue during the development of Sonic Spinball. Apparently, someone in a position of power assumed that they would just be able to use the Sonic theme from the first two Genesis games for Spinball, as well. That assumption was wrong, as the rights to the song belonged to the band that had performed it (Dreams Come True), and no one had bothered to mention this until right before this game, which was developed because Sega didn’t have a Sonic game ready for the holidays, was ready to ship. They managed to compose a theme just for this game in two hours, and were able to ship on schedule despite this teeny tiny little oversight that had legal ramifications and should have been solved much earlier. I respect Sega’s commitment to the bit, so much.

The most significant hurdle with the game, really, other than Sega’s propensity for making things more of a problem than they needed to be, was its difficulty. You can’t just pump in additional quarters to get more balls and continue onward, your progress is not saved, and you can’t just pick up from the stage you left off at, either. You have to one-credit complete the entire game, with your extra balls coming solely from exceeding point thresholds that will grant you another. It’s just not something you’re going to do in one sitting the first or second or third time out: you’ll have to become intimately familiar with the workings and layout of each of the game’s four stages in order to make it through in one go.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you need the patience to be able to do this, and not everyone has it. Luckily, as previously mentioned, emulation and save states and the like can take some of the sting off. You still need to actually complete every portion of the game in order to finish it, but in 2022, you can save/load your state as needed, right before a particularly tricky part that’s already killed you off a couple of times, or hell, constantly and just because if that’s what you want to do. You can’t do that on an actual physical cartridge of Sonic Spinball, so if having to do the whole thing in one go with little in the way of extra lives or retries doesn’t sound appealing, don’t play that version of the game.

You can emulate Sonic Spinball, as mentioned, but it’s available. You can find it in various collections released throughout the years, though some of those are going to be costly if they’re Sonic-specific. It’s available on Steam, and has been for over a decade now, and is also one of 40 games that come packaged in the Sega Genesis Mini. Presumably, it’s there in place of the missing Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, which have a sketchy re-release history due to licensing issues: a fitting tribute and nod to the past, no?

Thanks to @steaker on Twitter for the game request

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