On Christmas Day, for their usual festive stream, Hidden Palace once again released a bevy of surprise content in collaboration with Last Minute Continue. The initial release took place on their Twitch Channel here, with the full video now available to watch on YouTube here. Full documentation of the release can be seen here. The star of the show is the 2005 Shadow the Hedgehog, for which Hidden Palace acquired three prototype builds of the infamous spin-off, which featured Sonic’s dark counterpart wielding firearms.
But much of the other Sonic releases are of interest. Hidden Palace also acquired, and showcased, an early version of the obscure 1996 edutainment title Sonic’s Schoolhouse, where the famous hedgehog acts as a guide encouraging children aged five to nine to solve math, reading, and spelling questions. The prototype game has few differences relative to the final version. The most notable one is that Sonic’s nemesis Dr. Robotnik is running around on foot, where he had a machine to assist with his locomotion in the final product.
Sonic’s addition to this project was relatively late. According to material from The Cutting Room Floor, originally the guide character was supposed to be a talking clock. The unsettling footage of Sonic’s Schoolhouse unnerved many viewers who had not previously been familiar with the game, although its content is fairly typical for edutainment games of this time period. Sonic’s Schoolhouse was a major influences for Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning, a 2018 title that leaned into the aesthetic of this genre to create a horror game. Interestingly, BAP Entertainment, which developed Sonic’s Schoolhouse, had previously Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead’s Revenge in 1995, a first-person shooter based on the film Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, and some have speculated that the two games were developed using the same basic engine.
Other previously unknown prototypes featured in this release include a prototype for Sonic Mega Collection Plus in 2004, 2005 prototypes of Sega Classics Collections, Sonic Gems Collection, and Sonic Riders, a prototype of the 2006 Windows port of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, and 2007 prototypes of Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity. The Shadow the Hedgehog build is of the greatest interest due to a large amount of material unused in the final game. One of the Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity prototypes also has debug features enabled, which should make decomposition much easier. Not all of the donated prototypes were featured on the stream itself, with some being confirmed by the donor in chat before the formal release of all the material on Hidden Palace proper.
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