Sonic Epoch, a Sonic fangame made around 2001ish when SFGHQ (Sonic Fan Game Headquarters) was huge, and it was pretty much the Internet geek thing to do. Scroller v3 / Sonic Epoch was the culmination of all of my persistent childhood studying of video games without formal education or direction.
Sonic Epoch was the only Scroller v3 project, and also was taken very far. However, it was never finished, as I let Personal Drama™ cause me to no longer want to work on it.
It has obvious issues everywhere -- the graphics are largely based from poorly edited background art stolen from RealMedia files and VHS tapes (the only sources available at the time.) The sprites are far too large for gameplay (although reasonable for the cinematics.) The gameplay itself is not very Sonic-like and has lots of control and detection issues. But, if you had watched my prior Scroller v1/v2 video, you can see this is leaps and bounds ahead of that at least. :)
Despite its problems, it was an honest attempt at making an epic Sonic the Hedgehog game using the characters defined by the "Saturday Morning" / "SatAM" cartoon. And while it suffers from a lot of inexperience and immaturity on my part, it did engage the entire community, and a whole MIDI soundtrack was written for it.
This video is a truncated summary of the basic plot, which is that Dr. Robotnik has invented a teleportation system that will be utilized to send his machines out to the Great Forest in large numbers instantaneously, intended to weed out the Freedom Fighter groups.
When Sonic shows up unannounced, Robotnik distracts him with a new hedgehog robot (following the mainline "Metal Sonic" idea), which accidentally causes a power ring to get jammed in the initial prototype teleporters. This results in an overload and explosion of the teleporters, and Sonic awakens 10 years in the future.
Sally meanwhile had to deal with the fallout of the presumed death of the hero, the loss of the other Freedom Fighters (sans Tails) to Robotnik, and trying to continue on in general. In the decade that passed, Tails became an aggressive thug, Sally's given up on life, and everything just sort of sits in an unstable stasis.
Until a strange fireball streaks across the sky...
