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Much has already been written about Sonic Crackers, so it is not our intention to recycle the same material in this article. Thanks to the diligent work by the Sonic community, it is now well known that the SEGA Genesis prototype is not an impossibly complex homebrew project or a cheeky April Fool’s joke, but rather an official SEGA engine test of what would later become Knuckles’ Chaotix for the 32X (link). There is plenty of evidence to back up that claim.

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

Sonic Crackers

Knuckles’ Chaotix

It is surprising, however, that with so much information on the Internet about Sonic Crackers, no one has ever named names, tracked down the original source, and unearthed the truth of how an unreleased first-party Sonic title was leaked to the public or why some fifteen or so copies of said game rest in collectors’ hands all over the world. Nintendo Player hopes that the following investigation will help answer some of these questions.

Let’s get cracking.

Our Sonic Crackers story began in 2010, when a copy came up for sale in Belgium. Although we were the highest bidder, the eBay auction had a reserve, and in the end, it was not met.

One year later, the same seller sent a message to inform us that he was selling the game again. We bid and won this time. Sonic Crackers was finally ours.

We here at Nintendo Player are always curious about how these prototypes leak out, so we decided to ask him.

“I got this proto from an employee who worked at SEGA UK in 1995,” he replied.

When we asked a follow-up question about contacting this SEGA UK employee, the seller stopped responding to our inquiries.

We figured that the only way to find the original source would be to do some detective work of our own and retrace the provenance of one of the other known copies. Some Sonic Crackers were on long boards, others on short boards with two or four EPROM chips. There were so many variations. Where to begin?

Our online research led us to a thread on boards.ie, an Irish social message board. A collector named Oisin McGovern living in Dublin, Ireland had a copy of the game that looked strikingly similar to ours and others we have seen in the past.

Exhibit A: Our Copy

Exhibit B: Oisin’s Copy

 (photo courtesy of Oisin M.)

The resemblance was uncanny: the same silk-screening on an official 171-5694-01 (8MEGA 4EP-ROM M5) SEGA dev board, the same components, a match of at least one of the EPROM chips (soldered),  even the chips’ stickers looked identical and were laid on top of the EPROMs in a similar fashion.

Surely, both of these games must have come from the same source. Now it was only a matter of retracing the provenance.

After some more digging, we discovered that Oisin purchased his Sonic Crackers from another collector, Rob Ivy of Montgomery, Alabama. We then contacted Rob to find out how he happened to come across the game.

Pictured: Sonic Crackers field level 1.

“I acquired my copy from a guy who was a serious Atari prototype collector in the mid-90s,” Rob told us. “He purchased a large lot of Atari prototypes, and the Sonic Crackers cartridge was ‘tossed in’ as a bonus. He didn’t care much for it, and forgot he even had it until around 2005 when I acquired it.”

This serious Atari prototype collector wound up being game store owner Dan Mowczan of Flint, Michigan.

“I did receive it from a SEGA employee a very long time ago,” Dan said. “About 1996 or so. He was an ex-employee and he was attending a game collector function at a store in New Jersey. We were on vacation in NY. I ended up getting this and a stamped/professional disk for some SEGA CD game marked not for resale/beta only.”

He continued, “I doubt if I can remember the name. There were dozens of people there. I think I traded some Starpath Superchargers for those and I think a copy of 2600 Motorodeo.”

(photo courtesy of Oisin M.)

“It was put into a MegaDrive cartridge for safe keeping.”

We then asked if the New Jersey store might have been the one located in Clifton called Digital Press.

“I’m pretty sure it was Digital Press, the photos on their website look very familiar. A bunch of Atari heavy hitters were there (John Hardie, Keita Iida, Sean Kelly, etc.). Most of the guys who started Classic Gaming Expo in Vegas (although I think we called it World of Atari the first year). At the time we didn’t give two craps about much else outside of pre-Nintendo. I’m not sure if any of them would remember who it was. I mean, I had the thing forever and until I sent it to Rob; he was the first one to even tell me that people collected Genesis rarities. These guys had access to a lot of prototypes at the time, John was raiding dumpsters in Sunnyvale [the old headquarters of Atari] and they were hunting down most of the old Atari employees and going after their stashes.”

He concluded by saying again, “No names that I can recollect though, I’m sad to say.”

Dan did, however, correct the Belgium seller by stating that the unknown individual was an ex-employee of SEGA of America, not SEGA UK.

 Pictured: Sonic Crackers field level 2.

So we now knew that the person we were looking for worked at SEGA of America, had some connection to the East Coast, and collected Atari games. It wasn’t much to work with, but we were determined to carry on.

It should also be noted that the same year Dan had his encounter with this ex-employee, the first ROM of Sonic Crackers was released on a Belgium BBS by a group called Morgoth (link).

Belgium? The same country as where our copy originated? Was there a connection?

When the leads dried up, and confusion started to set in, we decided to turn our attention to looking up the history of Knuckles’ Chaotix and how Sonic Crackers morphed into that game. Maybe this mysterious SEGA employee contributed to its development in some way.

Beginning in the late 1980’s, SEGA offered a toll-free hotline (1-800-USA-SEGA) for gamers to call and receive tips and strategies. Players could also write to SEGA and ask for help, and the company would mail back free walkthroughs.

A SEGA of America employee by the name of Clinton (“Clint”) R. Dyer is credited for writing many of these guides. At the bottom of his guide for Sonic & Knuckles, Dyer wrote:

“You defeated Dr. Robotnik, but in the midst of the battle you forgot to destroy the Death Egg. What does this mean? Stay tuned for more Hedgehog Adventures.

The End

Sonic Chaotic?

32X”

This cryptic message appears to be hinting at a new Sonic game for the 32X add-on called Sonic Chaotic. Could this have been the precursor to the 1995 game Knuckles’ Chaotix?

Pictured: Sonic Crackers ROM header has a copyright date of July 1994 (and an alternative title, Sonic Studium), while the title screen shows a build date of April 1, 1994 (“19940401″).

The December 16, 1994 copyright of the document would place this announcement five months after the July build date of Sonic Crackers (or eight months after the April date).

Interestingly enough, a beta of Knuckles’ Chaotix (prototype 1207) with the build date of December 7, 1994 (one week before the date on Dyer’s guide) was found to include hidden text that spells out “Sonic Crackers S32X” in the Genesis VDP viewer.

“S32X” refers to Super 32X, the official name of the SEGA 32X add-on in Japan.

Dyer, then, had knowledge of an early Knuckles’ Chaotix, when it was still a true Sonic game instead of a spin-off title.

He stayed on to the end of that game’s development, after the change from Sonic to Knuckles, as evidenced by Dyer’s name appearing under “Special Thanks” in Knuckles’ Chaotix‘s credits (link).

Upon further investigation,we found out that Dyer also worked in the marketing department at SEGA and contributed screenshots and media to first-party SEGA games published from 1993 to 1996 (link).

A quick search led us to Dyer’s personal web site, called Clint’s Handheld Web Page.

According to Dyer’s “My Story” page, he was born on the East Coast in Lancaster, PA and lived there until his parents moved to California when he turned 3. In 1989, he joined SEGA of America in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked in the Consumer Service Department. His “re-entrance into classic game collecting and playing” started in 1992 when his relatives on the East Coast sent several Atari 2600 games to him (link).

Pictured: Clint Dyer–give or take a few arms. (photo retrieved from Clint’s Handheld Web Page)

Did we finally find our guy? There was only one way to be sure: We asked Dan if the name rang a bell.

“Holy crap. That might be right,” Dan wrote back. “I remember Clint running in those circles back then.”

According to veteran prototype collector, Adam Harvey, Dyer had a record of picking from the trash while working at SEGA. He found and later sold SEGA handheld system mock-ups and a mock-up of the SEGA Neptune, which could be seen at the 2011 E3 convention. He also sold many SEGA Master System and SEGA Genesis prototypes.

Respected prototype dealer, Jason Wilson, even claimed that Dyer had sold “a few” Sonic Crackers in the past.

“[Mine] came from Clint Dyer who worked at SEGA for many years,” Wilson said. “And if it came from me through him I can assure you it is genuine.”

We tried contacting Dyer for confirmation, but all of our e-mails bounced. The last update on his handheld site came in 2000. He sold his collection and hasn’t been heard from since.

Pictured: Sonic Crackers prototype playing on real hardware. (photo courtesy of Oisin M.)

Although it would have been nice to personally speak with him, we think we can finally put this matter to rest and say with some certainty that Clint Dyer is indeed the original source of Sonic Crackers, or at least one of the original sources. Everything points back to him. And all it took was a travel around the world from Belgium to Ireland to Alabama to Michigan to New Jersey to San Francisco.

Now the reason for there being so many copies of Sonic Crackers is still up for debate and speculation. The most prevalent theory is that Dyer (or someone else with access to several SEGA dev boards) wrote the same ROM to these carts and walked away with them.

Dyer mentioned on his site that after SEGA laid him off, he found a new job, and then was laid off again. In his own words, “I am currently not working, selling some stuff on eBay, just to get by. I think I was sick and tired of getting laid off from jobs, so I just stopped trying” (link).

Could he have duplicated Crackers in order to supplement his income?

We have no way of knowing if these accusations of fraud and theft are true or not because we could not get in touch with Dyer to hear his side of the story (although, realistically, we cannot imagine anyone fessing up to these crimes outside of a court hearing).

However, remember what Rob and Dan said: Sonic Crackers was included as a bonus, as an afterthought, because Atari was the hot thing to collect at the time. Would it make much financial sense to try to profit from a Genesis game when there didn’t appear to be much of a market back then for “newer” console prototypes? If not for profit, why, then, was Sonic Crackers copied to several cartridges? What reason was there to bootleg a Sonic prototype game when Atari was all the rage?

Many questions remain. The mystery lives on. We may never get the full story behind Sonic Crackers, but at least we know someone who may hold the answers.