Trivia / Sonic the Hedgehog 4

• Author's Saving Throw: When Episode I was leaked, players were greatly disappointed at two particular levels: Casino Street Zone Act 2 was nothing but a small pinball area where you had to collect 100,000 points, while Lost Labyrinth Zone Act 2 was entirely focused on finicky motion controls. The game was delayed and both levels were replaced in the console version. The mobile version still kept them, due to those levels being built with mobile in mind.
• B-Team Sequel: Unlike the past four classic entries, both episodes were developed by Dimps, the same team behind the Sonic Advance Trilogy, Sonic Rush, and Sonic Rush Adventure as opposed to Sonic Team and the (defunct) Sega Technical Institute, though the former still played a supervisory role in its development.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The official website has an intro section that gets the story wrong for Sonic & Knuckles. The Sonic story comes before the Knuckles story, but the website says they happened simultaneously.
• Development Gag:
  • The earliest publicity for the game referred to it by the codename Project Needlemouse. "Mr. Needlemouse" being an infamous and widely used mistranslation of what Sonic Team originally called Sonic back in his early conception stages, "Mr. Hedgehog".
  • During Sega's character countdown◊ for the game, one of the characters listed is "Sonic's new friend Mr. Needlemouse". Over the course of the countdown, Mr. Needlemouse's name remains as others get rejected. On the final day, in which Sonic was revealed to be the only protagonist, Mr. Needlemouse was the only character to have more than one rejection stamp over his name◊, possibly as a Self-Deprecation to the games' trend of having a bloated cast.
  • The Ferris wheels in the background of Casino Street Zone read "Sonic the Portable", which was the game's original name back when it was intended as a phone-exclusive game.
  • All of the Zones in Episode II are similar to aborted Sonic 2 Zones: a forest (based on Wood Zone), a desert that would be palette shifted to resemble a winter snowdrift with a Christmas theme (based on Sand Shower Zone^note commonly referred to as "Dust Hill Zone", which is actually the early name for Mystic Cave), and an extension of the final Death Egg Zone (it was originally going to be two Acts). Additionally, Oil Desert Zone is very reminiscent of a hoax mockup for yet another scrapped zone, Genocide City Zone.
  • A subtle one comes with Sky Fortress; as revealed by late prototypes of Sonic 2, Sky Fortress was meant to be Wing Fortress's original name.◊
• Early-Bird Cameo: One of the trailers for the game uses a song that heavily relies on the Recurring Riff from Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Later that same year, the next installment in the series, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, was unveiled and released.
• Executive Meddling: The first episode was originally planned as a mobile phone game named Sonic the Portable, intended as a low-key spinoff to test the gyroscope capabilities of smartphones. Sega of America instead decided to brand the game as Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and push it to consoles, to appease longtime fans of the series. This move ironically backfired; said fans felt it wasn't faithful enough to the Genesis games to warrant the title, which would have been avoided if it was merely a mobile phone spinoff.
• Flip-Flop of God: When it was announced, press releases stated that this game is set between Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Adventure, hence why it uses the modern character designs. However, after Episode III was canceled, the series was split into a "classic" continuity and a "modern" continuity, so it became unclear where this game stands. It is not considered a classic-era game, with the classic-styled Sonic Mania filling its role as a sequel to Sonic 3, but it is not considered a modern-era game either, with comments from the writers of Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) indicating that Sonic Team considers Sonic Adventure the beginning of the modern continuity. All of these details would suggest that this game is no longer canon... except it's been flip-flopped on again following the release of games like Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Superstars, as well as TailsTube, which establish that the series is returning to a pre-split continuity. While the game's canonicity and exact placement in the timeline is still unknown, the IDW comics using enemies and locations from it as well as an unexpected playset release in 2023 focused around Episode II's final boss suggest SEGA are at least not keen to have it forgotten.
• Franchise Killer: The lukewarm reception and poor sales of Episode II resulted in Episode III getting canceled and killed any hope for continuation of the 4 saga. This thankfully didn't apply to the rest of the Sonic franchise. In fact, the next 2D console game after this is Sonic Mania, which ignores the events of 4 entirely.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: With the Wii Shop Channel shut down, the WiiWare version of Episode I is no longer available for purchase. That said, the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Steam and mobile versions can still be purchased and downloaded, at least for now.
• Refitted for Sequel: The boss music in Episode I is actually a rearrangement of a scrapped boss theme from Sonic 3D Blast.
• Sequel Gap: Intended to be an official sequel to the Genesis games, 4 came out 16 years after Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
• Similarly Named Works: These official games are not to be confused with a similarly named bootleg SNES hack.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was initially a sole mobile phone title under the name "Sonic the Portable" (you can even still see the name in the Casino Street level in the background on the Ferris wheel) and wasn't even meant to be a numbered sequel to the series, but more a throwback to the original game when it was developed.
  • Episode II was meant to have a Wii port in the early stages, but it was cancelled when the decision was made to target the PS3 and 360 as the base platform. A compilation of the two episodes for the Wii U (and possibly also the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) was instead considered, but never went anywhere.
  • According to Ken Balough and Christian Whitehead, Episode III was planned to have been done by Sega Studios Australia - the studio behind the remake of Castle of Illusion - instead of Dimps, with Christian Whitehead even being asked to work on it. Unfortunately though, the game was ultimately cancelled before anything could come out of it. Though Christian Whitehead would eventually get to create a unrelated classic Sonic title a few years later.

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