
Yes, the presence of Super Sonic was a major catalyst in making Knuckles in Sonic 2 possible, but not in the manner described. After all, the levels in Sonic 2 are at times not very conductive either, but the developers found a way to work around those issues regardless. He's not wrong, but I still find that a flimsy excuse. We realized that the construction of the world was really made for and when you started putting other characters into that world, it didn't really work we didn't want people to have a bad experience, so we put them into the special stages.įor Sonic 2, the maps were made so that when you fly around as Super Sonic, you can fly around pretty easily The maps are pretty tall in construction, so because of that we were able to fit Knuckles in and play around with him. Takashi Iizuka, senior game designer for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, says it's because Sonic 1's level design wasn't conductive to using Knuckles' abilities:

You’ll be able to choose how many lives you have as long as it’s up to 9, what stage you go to and what difficulty it’s set at.Of course, this is actually a splash screen for the "Blue Sphere" bonus game, but more to the point, it suggests there is NO WAY to combine the two games into one, as was previously done with Sonic 2.


Bear in mind, most of these games came out pre-home internet so as a child I remember the sheer “information broker” feeling that rushed over me as I got to tell my friend something that could completely change up that game they were playing. A time when almost every game out there wasn’t complete unless it had some sort of secret or cheat code.

A lot of these games came out in a time well before “achievements” and “trophies” dominated the gaming scape.
