US Gold's Out Run cover returns as a t-shirt

Those of us living in Europe probably had our first experience of Out Run thanks to US Gold, who ported many Sega licenses to home micros during the 1980s and 1990s. Clearly I did - I used the same font from the Out Run logo on this blog!

Generally, UK-made ports had unique cover art from the rest of the world, as was the case with Out Run. Americans may be familiar with this, the console cover art:


Whereas in Europe we got this, the computer version's cover art:

Ooh, shiny!

Anyway, what has this got to do with anything? Well, Sega Europe are offering the artwork on a t-shirt in a competition! The only problem is, they haven't told us how we can actually win it. All that has been said by Sega is "accept the challenge"...

So, you can start trying to win the t-shirt now! First-posting on Sega's blog didn't work, so maybe you have to send them a nice email outlining why you should win it. Or maybe the first person to drive to Sega Europe HQ in a Ferrari Testarossa wins it? We'll just have to wait and see.

OutRun Online Arcade is released on April 15th on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

[Source: Sega Europe]

Play unported Sega games on the ZX Spectrum

Some Sega games were never ported over to the ZX Spectrum, either because they came out before the computer or too late in its life. Others were started but never finished. But now, thanks to the internet, some coders have decided to port those games themselves.

Up first is Columns. This has seen numerous unofficial ports to the Spectrum, the best of these coming from Computer Emuzone. The gameplay has been transferred brilliantly, and even has a nice rendition of Clotho. You'll also notice the title screen has the angels present from the original version.


A less successful port of a Sega game is Daytona USA, coded entirely in Basic. Oh dear. The game is top-down, and features all the tracks from the arcade (which are identical). My verdict? Stick to the Saturn version!


Next up is Deep Scan. The arcade version was released in 1979, too early for the Spectrum. It has since been ported, and is almost arcade-perfect! For those of you that haven't heard of Deep Scan, you are a boat that must bomb submarines. I'm sure you've played it on your mobile phones under a different name.


Perhaps the most infamous Sega game never ported to the Spectrum (or Commodore machines) is Sonic the Hedgehog. The game was apparently started by US Gold, who handled most of Sega's licenses. Unfortunately the game was never finished, allegedly due to the 16-bit version increasing the Mega Drive's popularity. Other versions may have taken away from this success, so the project was abandoned.

Sorry for the terrible '90s-compression quality!

Instead, coders began their own version based on the Master System port. This was to be the "fastest game on the Spectrum", featuring scrolling in all directions. The game eventually went the way of Sonic X-Treme and hasn't been touched since 2001. Perhaps one day the game will finally make its way over to home micros!

Screenshots found for Amiga version of Sonic the Hedgehog

Recently screenshots of a prototype Amiga conversion of Sonic the Hedgehog were uncovered, thanks to Unseen64. The screenshots come from the Italian version of The Games Machine, dated September 1991, and show the title screen as well as a section of Green Hill Zone.

The screenshots are most likely mock-ups, say some members of Sonic Retro. However it has been confirmed that US Gold did buy the rights to the home computer versions of Sonic, meaning conversions for the Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were to be produced. This was widely reported in magazines at the time, including Zzap!64 and C+VG.

One former US Gold developer has stated that the pictures are indeed screenshots from the PC version of the game, which would be used to develop the ports. The original article states that the magazine received the pictures as photos.

In my opinion, the screenshots do look as though they have been photographed from a monitor. Bending is visible due to the shape of the monitor, as are other features such as blurring that is common in screen photographs. However they could just be mockups created on a PC and then photographed.

It is unknown why the ports were cancelled, but one likely explanation is that the game was selling Sega a lot of Mega Drives so ports onto other systems would reduce sales. Sonic would certainly have been possible on home computers if it was done on the Master System, so technical limitations were probably not the reason for the cancellation. As of 2008, no prototypes have been uncovered and these are the only known pictures of the computer version of the game.