It’s hard to overstate how important Sonic the Hedgehog was to Sega. Seen as just another company in the giant shadow of Nintendo, it was Sonic who pushed Sega to the next level and made them a legitimate contender to the house that Mario built. As the third game of the series loomed, the developers decided they had to go bigger. In 1994, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was released, and it was truly a bigger game. It was also half the game that Sega wanted to put out.
After the events of Sonic 2, Sonic and Tails crash land on the mysterious Angel Island. It is here that they will meet a strange echidna named Knuckles. The problem is that Dr. Eggman has met him first and convinced him that Sonic is after the Master Emerald. Sonic will have to run fast, get the missing chaos emeralds and try to stop Eggman from getting his hands on this massive power source all the while trying to convince Knuckles that he is not an enemy.
The gamplay of Sonic 3 has not changed from its previous games. Run through all the mechanical foes while collecting as many rings as you can. The change is how massive the games are. The developers wanted levels three times the size of the previous game. The graphics have a new area to show and the addition of Knuckles puts an uncertain element into the levels. The game was critically acclaimed, much like all the Sonic games up until that point, and Sega could finally breathe a little easy.
It’s a wonder they even made it that far. Sonic 3 started to become too big during its development. The developers realized that the game would have to be split in two. The other half, Sonic and Knuckles, would come out the same year, but gamers didn’t quite grasp that they were playing the second half of one big story. Because of this, Sonic 3 seems to end at a very strange place, with nothing truly being resolved. The other major problem was that Michel Jackson had come on board to do part of the soundtrack but left before the project was complete. The game is not technically even Sonic 3, as Sonic CD had come out before it.
With all the problems Sega had, Sonic 3 would go down as the last “true” Sonic game. The next games and the next decades would see the blue speedster go off on different sorts of adventures. It was not until Sonic Mania in 2017, that would we see a sequel and a return to this style of play. Much as Knuckles was the last of his kind, Sonic 3 would be the last of its until just recently.
