So, few days ago, the Intellivision Amico debacle started reminding me of the Zeebo, one of the primerly examples of how a digital-only system is a flawed idea (not to mention the lack of horsepower, as it's the case with the Amico);
I was talking with some friends and I brought up the fact that Sonic Adventure was once planned for the console (it was never released, but I remember vividly it being announced).. and for my surprise, no one in that conversation was aware of this. I started digging up and discovered there is little to no documentation of that.. and some even took that as a misguided rumor (I've seen some suggest it would've been some mobile Sonic game like Sonic Jump instead) or just a made up story overall; There's no Wiki pages that mention, nothing! So.. let's start from the begining!
I made a whole thread on Twitter discussing the details, but I'll transcribe here with some new details that surfaced
Beginning with the Zeebo itself... the console never really stood a chance of succeeding in the market within the fierce competition of the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360. It was intended to have an acessible entry price for Latin America countries, using 3G technology for its downloads and all.. but at the sametime, the appeal of what it could offer was limited and didn't had much room for potential; The console had a weak hardware that resulted mostly in mobile games ported over (albeit modified to fit to a console experience, which is neat!), educational games with popular regional licenses and retro games with a variable degree of success in the transition (Tekken 2, Quake II, Pac-Mania, Joe & Mac and so on...)
Prior the console's launch (2009), the official site (now completely closed) was listing a couple of games that would be made available through time, and some of them were left in the cutting room floor, as the system was very short lived with its store shutting down in 2011;
And among those games there were a couple of SEGA titles; surprising choices overall given what was already being discussed about the console publicly; - Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi and Virtua Tennis 3 (Holy moly...); and apparently, the only currently documented evidence of that is a singular screencap of the site of when it was up (at least that I could find..)
Now, I don't know why no one was able to verify this before (probably lack of interest..), but using the WayBack Machine, the archive page for the official site, does have the listing as showed above, even though the images are all broken, you can see their names (November 2008)
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081113143856/http://www.zeebo.com.br/
To further cement this, Street Fighter Alpha 1 was another one of those titles shown in the listing that was never released; It ever was featured on the launch trailer for the Zeebo;
And the final build was eventually leaked (and frankly?, this is more competent that I ever imagined, no load times and all!)
Then what happened? Well, as you may suspect, simply the Zeebo wasn't capable of running anything close of a Dreamcast within reason (let alone Virtua Tennis 3 lol), and my suspicious were confirmed conveniently today on that Twitter thread I made, as Platy made me a bridge with a former Tec-Toy tester (@suzanabueno) that worked on many Zeebo projects;
She told us that they never even had such games tested, but everyone internally (and I suppose even SEGA themselves) was expecting much better specs from the system and the listing was legit; They eventually got the final hardware and saw that wasn't feaseble to continue with the idea, the games were eventually delisted from the site and SEGA didn't provide anything else on their place; They completely pulled their support.
That's the more shocking part of the whole story, I suppose; As Tec-Toy is still to this day a very important partner for SEGA in Brazil, and they have great working relationship; And yet, when they got to this hurdle, never even offered a couple of mobile games, or Master System and Genesis games.
Funny thing is that, assuming the factors of this being promised "a PS2 levels of hardware", the games with their specific cover arts selected and the timeframe (Sonic Adventure DX had yet to be ported for the Xbox 360 and PS3), this could had been the only other way to legally play the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure, as SEGA continues to port the DX version forward (which is far from ideal). This is not a very good prospect either, since.. you know.. this would be much worse for the aviability of the title lol
and even if they managed to have Crazy Taxi in there.. an unmodified Dreamcast port would have all the licensed music people so much miss, right? Crazy to think about!
So yeah, I wanted to bring awareness for this since there was a couple of new direct details we got and there is virtually no documentation of that, and I think it's important to update on this stuff, even if ultimately didn't happen.
The Zeebo still lives on the homebrew community; People actually managed to preserve many (if not all) of its games; But it's still a very niche thing, since the console never took off anyway. And had this been released, we could be telling you that the Zeebo is the secret best way to play the original Sonic Adventure (assuming it worked at all :p)
I was talking with some friends and I brought up the fact that Sonic Adventure was once planned for the console (it was never released, but I remember vividly it being announced).. and for my surprise, no one in that conversation was aware of this. I started digging up and discovered there is little to no documentation of that.. and some even took that as a misguided rumor (I've seen some suggest it would've been some mobile Sonic game like Sonic Jump instead) or just a made up story overall; There's no Wiki pages that mention, nothing! So.. let's start from the begining!
I made a whole thread on Twitter discussing the details, but I'll transcribe here with some new details that surfaced
Beginning with the Zeebo itself... the console never really stood a chance of succeeding in the market within the fierce competition of the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360. It was intended to have an acessible entry price for Latin America countries, using 3G technology for its downloads and all.. but at the sametime, the appeal of what it could offer was limited and didn't had much room for potential; The console had a weak hardware that resulted mostly in mobile games ported over (albeit modified to fit to a console experience, which is neat!), educational games with popular regional licenses and retro games with a variable degree of success in the transition (Tekken 2, Quake II, Pac-Mania, Joe & Mac and so on...)
Prior the console's launch (2009), the official site (now completely closed) was listing a couple of games that would be made available through time, and some of them were left in the cutting room floor, as the system was very short lived with its store shutting down in 2011;
And among those games there were a couple of SEGA titles; surprising choices overall given what was already being discussed about the console publicly; - Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi and Virtua Tennis 3 (Holy moly...); and apparently, the only currently documented evidence of that is a singular screencap of the site of when it was up (at least that I could find..)
Now, I don't know why no one was able to verify this before (probably lack of interest..), but using the WayBack Machine, the archive page for the official site, does have the listing as showed above, even though the images are all broken, you can see their names (November 2008)
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081113143856/http://www.zeebo.com.br/
To further cement this, Street Fighter Alpha 1 was another one of those titles shown in the listing that was never released; It ever was featured on the launch trailer for the Zeebo;
And the final build was eventually leaked (and frankly?, this is more competent that I ever imagined, no load times and all!)
Then what happened? Well, as you may suspect, simply the Zeebo wasn't capable of running anything close of a Dreamcast within reason (let alone Virtua Tennis 3 lol), and my suspicious were confirmed conveniently today on that Twitter thread I made, as Platy made me a bridge with a former Tec-Toy tester (@suzanabueno) that worked on many Zeebo projects;
She told us that they never even had such games tested, but everyone internally (and I suppose even SEGA themselves) was expecting much better specs from the system and the listing was legit; They eventually got the final hardware and saw that wasn't feaseble to continue with the idea, the games were eventually delisted from the site and SEGA didn't provide anything else on their place; They completely pulled their support.
That's the more shocking part of the whole story, I suppose; As Tec-Toy is still to this day a very important partner for SEGA in Brazil, and they have great working relationship; And yet, when they got to this hurdle, never even offered a couple of mobile games, or Master System and Genesis games.
Funny thing is that, assuming the factors of this being promised "a PS2 levels of hardware", the games with their specific cover arts selected and the timeframe (Sonic Adventure DX had yet to be ported for the Xbox 360 and PS3), this could had been the only other way to legally play the Dreamcast version of Sonic Adventure, as SEGA continues to port the DX version forward (which is far from ideal). This is not a very good prospect either, since.. you know.. this would be much worse for the aviability of the title lol
and even if they managed to have Crazy Taxi in there.. an unmodified Dreamcast port would have all the licensed music people so much miss, right? Crazy to think about!
So yeah, I wanted to bring awareness for this since there was a couple of new direct details we got and there is virtually no documentation of that, and I think it's important to update on this stuff, even if ultimately didn't happen.
The Zeebo still lives on the homebrew community; People actually managed to preserve many (if not all) of its games; But it's still a very niche thing, since the console never took off anyway. And had this been released, we could be telling you that the Zeebo is the secret best way to play the original Sonic Adventure (assuming it worked at all :p)
