Curiosities Vol. 17 - Blaze

So, back in the ancient mists of time, there was a preview in issue #115 (June 1991) of CVG of an Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog that never came into being. The reasons why such a game might have been cancelled are obvious: as soon as it was released in the UK, the first Sonic game, and Sonic in general launched a kind of SEGA-mania that would last for almost half a decade, and the Amiga was, in mid-1991, the only major 16-bit competition to the Mega Drive in the UK that didn't have to be imported. Sonic appearing on the Amiga might have hampered sales of the Mega Drive, which was in the UK, almost monolithic in a way that the NES/Famicom was in the US and Japan in the 1980s.

Some might have said that the Amiga just couldn't do everything that the Mega Drive did, and a substandard port might also damage the brand. Blaze, a fanmade demo for an Amiga Sonic-alike could be used as evidence for and against this theory. On the surface, it does do a lot of the fancy tricks seen in Mega Drive Sonic: high-speed scrolling, loop-the-loops, water-surface reflections, and so on. However, it came out in 1993, not 1991. And, to the best of my knowledge, no commercially released Amiga platformers attempted any of this stuff, despite how poentially lucrative it might have been.

It does as decent a job as you might expect of emulating the feel of a genuine Sonic game, too. Not only does it have loops, but one particular highlight is a massive series of five linked loops in quick succession. There's also robot crabs and hornets, and gems to collect in lieu of rings. Blaze even curls into a ball to attck when he jumps! Interestingly, though, if you press down while running, he doesn't curl into a ball, but goes into a Splatterhouse-esque sliding kick.

The physics do occasionally feel a little off, particularly with regards to running up and jumping off of quarter pipes. This can be forgiven, though, by that fact that this was made in an age before widespread internet access, and long before there was the meticulous observation and analysis of Sonic phyisics that there is today. In fact, it's obviously impossible to be totally one hundred percent certain about this, but I think Blaze might be the first ever Sonic fangame!

So, that's Blaze. An interesting thing in many ways. It's a shame it never got fleshed out into a full game. It would obviously have been too late to have saved the Amiga from its inevitable doom, but it would at least have freed Amiga fans from decades of pretending Zool was as good as any platform game that originated on consoles.