Trivia / Sega Technical Institute

• Troubled Production: Sonic X-treme. Not only was it Christmas Rushed, but the development team was repeatedly told to start over without the release date changed. Despite the team working round the clock, the project eventually was cancelled for good, with a serviceable but unremarkable Updated Re-release of Sonic 3D Blast filling the void for a Sega Saturn launch title. Read its unfortunate history here.
  • To a lesser extent, Kid Chameleon. Sega was extremely hesitant to let this new development team design a brand new character that might not catch on, and really made STI prove themselves. Thankfully, the results of this title turned out much better than Sonic X-treme.
  • Sonic 2, for a number of reasons: It was Christmas Rushed (the team only had 9 months to work on it, instead of a full year), so tons of content had to be dropped (including, most famously, Hidden Palace Zone). The American and Japanese teams had difficulty working together. Mark Cerny, who founded STI, left the project part of the way through, leaving Masaharu Yoshii to take the reins. Thankfully, the game was completed and went on to become one of Sega's biggest sellers, but it wasn't easy getting there.
• What Could Have Been: There was a side project by Chris Senn using the X-Treme engine but was scrapped when SGI shut down in 1997. Sprite for the scrapped game named Gabby◊ Chaz◊ can be found in the prototype for Sonic X-Treme that was found in 2009 used for testing engine purposes.