Collection essentials #136: Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (Genesis)

For the third entry, Sega wanted to give Sonic his biggest, grandest adventure yet. There was a problem, though, that being time constraints. Making a bigger game with much more content than Sonic 2 was going to take a lot of time. And so, Sonic 3 got split into two releases. The Sonic 3 I’m talking about here, which you see in the photo, does have enough content for one standalone game (otherwise they wouldn’t have released it), but it’s really only half of what the developers intended to be the next game. More on that in my next post!

Sonic 3 was the first game in the series where you could actually save your progress, rather than use a level skip code to get to where you were when you got a game over. It was also the first game in the series to feature Knuckles the Echidna, who would go on to be one of the most recurring and iconic characters in the series. The story of this game is that, immediately after the end of Sonic 2, the defeated Dr. Robotnik’s ship crashes onto an island where Knuckles lives, and he tricks Knuckles into thinking that Sonic intends to steal the island’s precious Master Emerald, so Knuckles begins as an antagonist.

Sonic 3 is also notable for the involvement of the king of pop himself, Michael Jackson, who was a big video game fan and helped work on some of the game’s music. This information was kept secret from the public, which could be because of the infamous allegations made against him around the same time. His name isn’t in the credits and his involvement was merely a rumor for a long time, but was eventually confirmed to be true. 

I played lots of Sonic 1 and 2 growing up, but 3 was an elusive game that I only remember seeing once as a kid, when my cousins must have rented or borrowed it one time. I did own it as a teenager, but didn’t properly play it through until adulthood. There’s practically no reason to play standalone Sonic 3 anymore, to the point where it’s also not really worth giving an opinion on just Sonic 3 by itself, for reasons I’ll explain in my next post.