Back in the mid ’90s, when Sega slowly was losing its competitive edge against veteran Nintendo and newcomer Sony, they were also publishing a fair share of their games on Windows PCs. This isn’t as well known as their other stuff, considering most of them were ports of existing Genesis and Saturn games now running on the Windows 95 PCs of the era.
Most of the ports were of somewhat lesser-known stuff like Comix Zone and Tomcat Alley. Eventually they started releasing more iconic games, some even in compilations. But then a certain blue hedgehog burst onto the PC scene, and for real this time, rather than fan games made by Sonic diehards in Klik’n’Play.
Sonic & Knuckles Collection was released in late 1997 for Windows 1995, and was the second major Sonic game to reach PC, the first being two different ports of Sonic CD. Though the Hedgehog was branching out to other ventures, including the educational Sonic’s Schoolhouse, this was probably one of the biggest gets for PC gamers who didn’t really dabble much in the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive library.
I was strictly a Nintendo kid pretty much until the late ’90s, when I got my first PC. A Windows 3.11 Packard Bell machine. While I did own other platforms, including a Genesis, I never really got to really experience the platform’s greatest stuff until many years later, thus I never got to play Sonic 3 & Knuckles until this PC release.
Well, that infamous platform jumping section through rising water in Sonic 2‘s Chemical Plant Act 2 traumatized me pretty bad when I was younger. I ended up getting Sonic 3 not long after it came out in 1994, but when I got to Hydrocity Zone and realizing it was involve a lot of water, I got so scared that I shut off the Genesis and asked to return the game. While it doesn’t bother me nearly as much these days, I can still get a bit of a twinge whenever I hear that damn drowning music when playing a Sonic game. Damn you Yukifumi Makino, making a 10 second ditty that haunted kids for generations!
Over the years I have procured one, not two, but three copies of this dang game. The first one I got was part of a Jack in the Box promotion in 1999, which was part of a kid’s meal promotion the restaurant had around that time. had a few other Sega PC games such as Sonic 3D Blast, Bug! and the original Ecco the Dolphin. The others were a complete-in-box copy I found at in the bargain section at an office supply store, and a CD jewel case copy that was part of a Sonic three pack with Sonic CD and Sonic R.
They do say that you can never have enough of a game, but I think three copies is a tad much. But hey, it’s kinda hard to get rid of stuff like this, y’know?
There is a slight problem, though. This game was made for 1997-era computers. Windows 95 PCs running on Pentium I-era hardware at best. As of the time I’m writing this, it is 2016, and I’m running Windows 10 with probably hundred times the raw hardware power. What happens when you play the game now? Well, this:
Talk about ludicrous speed.
Yeah, the timing’s so fast that even Sonic himself couldn’t play this. There’s two ways to fix this for modern systems: Creating a S3K.INI file and putting it in your Windows folder that locks the framerate, of which there’s a tutorial at Sonic Retro, or download a patch Sega released that fixes that, available at Sonic Retro (safer for those who don’t wanna mess with Notepad and creating weird files.) (No longer available as of 2022.)
Now that we fixed the “gotta go fast” problem, what makes this unique from the Genesis original? Well, besides having Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, plus the lock on, it also features that ridiculous Blue Spheres minigame that appeared when you locked Sonic 1 onto the cart. No Knuckles in Sonic 2 here, sadly.
There is one more thing: The music. While most of the game has most of the iconic tunes — in FM synthesizer and General MIDI flavors — a few of them got mysteriously changed for the PC release. Namely Carnival Night, Ice Cap, and Launch Base, along with a few other incidental tracks. It’s a shame because Ice Cap and Launch Base are some of my favorite tracks from Sonic 3.
There’s two popular theories: The samples used could not be properly recreated on sound cards of the time, and then there’s the Michael Jackson theory. For those who aren’t aware, Jackson was tapped to compose the music for Sonic 3. He dropped out of the project, but the exact reason is unclear – depending on who you ask, it’s been anywhere from him not liking the YM2612 sound chip the Genesis used, to the child molestation scandals that haunted him that year – thus his assistants to the project, which included session musicians like Brad Buxer, were credited as composers instead. The reason some suggest the latter is because of royalties, but like the whole Jackson theory, things are unclear.
This particular change only applies to this release. All later releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, from Sonic Mega Collection, to Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, still use the original music. Though this might be for logistical reasons, since replacing music in older games is a bit harder than, oh say, changing Spider-Man so he’s pink in later releases of The Revenge of Shinobi. The whole Sonic 3 music thing is an interesting story, since about a dozen people made music for both this and Sonic & Knuckles. Maybe one day we’ll have proper credits for who composed what.
Update: On November 16, 2019, the group at Hidden Palace released a prototype of Sonic 3 from around November 1993, and it turns out the replaced music that was in Sonic & Knuckles Collection was originally in the game all along. This leads more credence to the Michael Jackson theory, but it’s good to know that the tunes were originally made for Sonic 3 and weren’t made exclusively for Sonic & Knuckles Collection.
You can check out more about that prototype on Hidden Palace here.
Other than that, the game is fairly the same as the 1994 Genesis classics. Nowadays it’s redundant considering you can play the original version through emulators like Sega Genesis and Mega Drive Classics on Steam, but when it was the mid ’90s and emulation was still in its infancy, this was a suitable substitute.
I wouldn’t recommend playing the game this way nowadays though. Now in an age where monitors can go beyond 60Hz, no amount of INI file updating and hacks are gonna make this reliable to play on modern devices. Hell, the game often hitches up while playing, which makes for an awful Sonic 3 & Knuckles experience.
Nowadays if you wanted to play Sonic 3 legally on PC, I’d honestly recommend buying the game on Steam and using the Angel Island Revisited modification. There’s been rumors of a compilation featuring all the classic Sonic games with the same updates that the mobile phone versions of Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 got, but I’ve heard nothing of that since. Probably due to the aforementioned music problem.
Honestly, the era when Sega developed and published PC games in the mid-to-late ’90s is woefully undocumented online. Outside of a few Sega fan sites, there’s not many places that talk of these games. At a time when Sega was doing a lot of unusual business decisions, the period where they published stuff onto the PC is the most fascinating. Makes me want to find some more of these PC releases and see how they’d run on modern machines. Can’t run any worse than this, right?
Some images and information here courtesy of Sonic Retro.
(Updated on 2/2/2022, the anniversary of the original Sonic the Hedgehog 3, for clarification and updated links.)
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