Trivia / Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball

• Absurdly Short Production Time: The game was developed and finished in just nine months.
• Christmas Rushed:
  • The game was hastily made as a holdover game for the 1993 holiday season, since Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was taking longer than expected to finish. The game didn't turn out far worse for the wear, having numerous clipping glitches, extremely awkward physics and numerous unfair situations on top of having no continues. And this was made by the same team that made Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
  • According to this YouTube comment, the game's composer, Howard Drossin, had very little time to compose the infamous Options music as he worked on it at the very last second. As a result, he had no time to optimise it and make it sound good. Drossin also composed the replacement title and game over themes in two hours.
• Creator Backlash: Designer Peter Morawiec regretted that the team didn't have time to polish the game.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": This was so far the first and only exposure of Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) to Japanese audiences.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Prototypes of the game show that it was originally planned to have rearrangements of the title theme and Game Over music from Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which ended up getting replaced with original themes composed by Howard Drossin in the final release after STI realized that Masato Nakamura owns most of the soundtrack to those games (including said themes) and didn't want to pay him the royalties to use them.
• Updated Re-release: There's actually three different versions officially released on the market:
  • The original American release.
  • The second version is the European one. This version has various changes compared with the American one: The options music was sped up, the song used in the opening cutscene is longer, the Lava Powerhouse was also sped up and fixes a bug that would make the PSG stop working after the song looped once.
  • The third version is the Japanese one. It's pretty similar to the American version, except without any of the changes from the European one, but it also replaces the "hee-haw" sound played when losing a life with a proper song, and the jumping sound is also different.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: It was rumored that a handful of carts actually made it off the assembly line and into stores with the original Sonic themes intact, rather than the replacement themes. As it turns out, the ROM with said themes that was dumped was actually a near-final prototype, and this change was made before any carts were manufactured.
• What Could Have Been: See the series page.
• Working Title: The original name for the game was Sonic the Hedgehog Pinball.