7/28/2003

This has been a really wild day for me. I was doing my daily habit of checking the online bootleg game forums. Bootleg games are charming yet bizarre and I want to know everything there is to them. I know about the usual games like Mickey Mania 7, Donkey Kong Country 4 and Somari.

It was at first a usual day at the forums, nothing too crazy. But someone joined the forums and he claimed to have an unreleased bootleg game. It was called “Super Sonic 7-in-1” and he said he’s worked on it. According to him, this wasn’t just an average collection of ROMS of whatever random games they’ve found at the market. They infact had to work off of Sonic 5 (Somari hack), Sonic 1, Sonic 2 and Sonic & Knuckles.

We were in shambles. We wanted details of the game itself, gameplay screenshots or even the rom itself, but from what he’s said, the game was lost in time as the company responsible burnt down in November 1998, mere days before the game came out. All he said was the game was an extended version of Sonic 5. He also had only sent a high quality scan of what could’ve been the game’s box art. It looks decent, but it has a surreal feeling to it.

We asked him how the company had burnt down. You wouldn’t believe the words he was saying, it’s almost like he was trying to fuck with us. First off, someone HAD died in the building after testing a prototype cartridge. Then the owner Chen remained to investigate. And at a fateful night in 1998? He set the building on fire and was sent to a mental institution after that.

This was already hard to believe as events as severe and ridiculous as those, you’d think they would have some form of documentation like newspaper articles (which we TRIED to find) but so far we found nothing. The guy recently spoke with “Chen” and said he had burnt the building because he encountered a sentient Sonic monster in the game. We didn’t believe them at all, but we’ll still try to find answers and see if this game really did exist.