Naka Ah, yes, those. I'm not surprised. See, we left the debug codes in the games because we thought people would have fun playing around with them. *laugh* But yeah, there was a lot of leftovers and unused stuff in Sonic 1 as well. I remember we made a rabbit enemy. It was lik e... "Rabbit-bus." Or "Rabbit-taxi." You know, sort of like Catbus (from My Neighbor Totoro).



But the biggest thing I remember we had that we didn't use in Sonic 1 was the break-dancing. We had this idea for the sound test. The composer for the game was one of the members of Dreams Come True, a famous Japanese band, so we wanted to do something special for the game's music. See, we wanted to have a separate sound-test screen with an animation of Sonic break-dancing while a "Sonic Band" played the game music. We were working on the images, and had enough space left on the cartridge memory for it, but once again time constraints prevented us from putting it in the program.

So what should we do with that leftover space? I suddenly had an epiphany! It said to me ... "SE-GA!" It came from our TV commercials, and that became the game's startup sound. I thought it made a good impression when you heard it, right? Though to fit it in, we had to delete all the break-dancing picture data we had made up to that point. Oshima was heartbroken, since we didn't need his pictures anymore. But seriously, that sound alone took up 1/8 of the 4 megabit ROM! Ah, those were the days...

You can find some interesting stuff by screwing around with the debug codes, too. Like in, if you put Sonic outside the walls of the special stage and just have him roll around in space, you encounter a weird background with some unused panels.Thank you very much for your time, Naka-san. We're sure that this interview will make a lot offans very happy!