Nearly two decades after it was canceled, we can finally play the lost Sonic the Hedgehog game. (After a fashion.)

Thanks to the tireless efforts of some devoted (and talented!) superfans, you can now play one level from the Sega Saturn game Sonic X-Treme using a modern Windows PC. Because the game never got past early development, don’t expect too much: The levels are haphazardly designed, the controls are bad, and the camera angle is frustrating. Of course, that could describe several finished Sonic games, so maybe this one will meet your expectations thoroughly.

Sega, for the unitiated, was built on Sonic. Had it not come up with the blue critter and his blazing-fast platforming game, its classic Genesis console might be a footnote in gaming history. Sega released many a Sonic game for Genesis, but when it came time to take its hero into polygonal 3-D on the Sega Saturn to compete against rival Mario's big dimensional shift in Super Mario 64, Sega choked. Thoroughly. Although it announced Sonic X-Treme in all the big gaming magazines, it never shipped a true Sonic sequel on Saturn. (Wikipedia offers a fascinating breakdown of the development hell it went through.)

In November, after years of research and near-misses, Sonic fans finally tracked down the source code for a Windows version of Sonic X-Treme. But it ran only on PCs with an obscure Nvidia graphics card called the NV1, which was used for Saturn development and created in collaboration with Sega.

This week came the big breakthrough: Dedicated fans are porting the Windows build to run on modern Windows machines without a need for the NV1 card, and they've released a preview. And now you can play the first level of Sonic X-Treme on your PC. (You must register for the forums to view the post; the download links are also hosted at the Sonic Retro forums.)

This build is something like a preview of the ideas the team was working on for the game; the player not only controls Sonic but can also rotate the levels as well, turning walls into floors and vice versa. There are rings and enemies scattered throughout the levels, but you can't interact with any of them. (Apparently these levels were assembled arbitrarily, purely so Sega could send screenshots to gaming magazines.)

You can get a sense of the difficulty that the developers faced putting Sonic into a free-roaming 3-D world. It's intrinsic to Sonic's character that he moves with lightning speed, something is in direct conflict with the precise control one needs to navigate complex 3-D pathways.

The team says it's still banging away at the source code and hopes to release more playable levels later.