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unlimitedtrees · 10 months

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u ever heard of Pepsi in Sonic 1

(alternative title for this post: the weird rom hack i made 6 years ago)

hello. at the time of me writing this opening paragraph, it is november 7th, and my old rom hack 'Pepsi in Sonic 1' turns six years old today.

you probably have not have heard of it. if you have, you probably either watched somecallmejohnny play it once, or you ran into it while looking up sonic rom hacks on youtube, or you got a random DM from me asking "u ever heard of pepsi in sonic 1" for no reason other than because its funny.

if you already know me, you know i am bad with words and conversation and stuff. but if you dont, i hope that helps a bit of understanding in why i might randomly ask u if u heard of this weird little rom hack. i am bad with starting a conversation ! and my dumb little sense of humor thinks it's funny to bring up a rom hack that doesnt even represent any of the things i currently do !

anyways, even though i joke a lot about this rom hack now and for a few years even Hated its very existence... i also have a deep love for it, as it was one of the few fangames ive made that i feel were made of pure, unrestrained passion. and i dont think i would be the same person i am now if not for this dumb little hack existing.

so, if u wish.. you can click the little 'read more' thingy to learn a bit about this crazy sonic hack i made when i was like, 13.

Alright, so Pepsi in Sonic 1 is a rom hack of (you guessed it) Sonic 1 that i made in 2016 for the sonic hacking contest. at that point, i had only been making games for 2 years and this was one of my first rom hacks ive ever made...

On the Surface, it looks like just a simple joke hack that replaces Sonic with a can of Pepsi. there's also a ton of other sprites that get changed into random little jokes, with some of the more notable changes being Big the Cat replacing Eggman, Jimmy Neutron replacing the Newtron badniks, and the wrecking ball sprite being replaced by a sprite based off Somecallmejohnny's "amiibo face". The game also has a ton of other silly little jokes, such as changing every level's names to something dumb or changing the level art slightly. And the people who played it pretty much wrote it off as just that... just a weird little joke hack that you may or may not have found funny.

but let me tell u.. there is more to this dumb little rom hack than u think ! one of the most major changes to the original game is that every level has been edited to have almost completely new level design.. and honestly a lot of the levels hold up pretty well. the Are some problems which come from the way they were designed.. for u see, i still didnt know a whole lot so a lot of the levels are built on top of the original Sonic 1 layouts, with some sections in some levels being kept the same, as well as all of the levels being forced within the original size limits of the levels (on Top of me having to deal with all the hardcoded bullshit from certain levels like Labyrinth and Scrap Brain).

So, some levels like 'Not Green Hill Zone', 'Dimps Place Zone', and 'Pepsi City Zone' have some really huge changes to the level layouts, while the rest of the game is still a little recognizable from the original Sonic 1 levels.. but i managed to make enough changes to where the whole game feels wildly different from vanilla Sonic 1. Not Only are all the levels different.. but all of them have a hidden "emerald monitor" which u can find to unlock one of the emeralds. they're in pretty difficult to find places, and when u collect all 6 emeralds they give you extra lives when destroyed. The only problem with them is that you can keep collecting the same emerald monitor in a level by dying... so you could cheat and get all 6 emeralds in one level. Still, it's a nice little thing that i put a lot of effort into making.

another one of the main big things in the hack is the Playable Characters. the main character is just a Pepsi Can who is basically just a sprite replacement of Sonic, However there are three other characters in the game that you can play. there is Pepsiman, who's main gimmick is that he can't actually do Damage while spinning. he's basically the game's hard mode, and you actually have to explore the third act of each level to find an invincibility monitor, as he also can't do damage to the bosses. he is the Running Hero, after all ! his only desire is to quench your thirst.. oh and also he can destroy eggman monitors without taking damage from them so. Yea.

You can also play as Classic Sonic, who is his own separate character and uses sprites from the 8-bit games. unlike the other characters, he actually has his own special move: The Drop Dash. You See, in the middle of the hack's development, Sonic Mania was revealed. So, as soon as i saw the drop dash in that game i just Had to implement it in this game. And Well, with it being one of the first instances of the drop dash in a fangame, it is implemented Very Poorly. But It Exists ! and there's actually secret paths you can take using it in the levels (something i wish Sonic Mania did but oh well..). Something that Classic Sonic doesnt have that the Pepsi Can and Pepsiman have is that they can perform the 'Shield Double Jump', in which you are given the ability to double jump while having a Shield. the double jump is pretty powerful, but it stops your speed. i didnt give it to Classic Sonic for Balancing reasons (AKA: i wanted there to be a reason to actually play as the other characters)

the only other character is actually a very hidden secret character: a Very Broken version of Knuckles. all of his sprites are broken and also i think it plays loud music while u play as him. thats all there is to him LOL!

Anyways. Um Yea. i put a lot of work into this rom hack back then. i was still pretty new to ROM hacking, with this being my first time using a disassembly. so i had to both learn basic ASM aswell as figure out how a ton of tools worked just for this game.. and i didn't even understand how most of the stuff worked by the end of it ! and i spent pretty much every weekend Exclusively on working on the hack. also, i had pretty much No Help with this game, with me having to rely on the Very Old and Outdated sonic retro wiki aswell as old forum posts just to implement the things i wanted (and there's still a ton of ideas i didnt get to implement)

when the game finally released at the hacking contest, i was very proud of it but also very Burnt Out. there was still a Ton of issues with this game... for One, all of the pixel art was pretty Bad. not only that, but my method for implementing artwork was very Confusing and Time consuming, with the different playable characters being a huge hassel as i did not know how to make them have different "mappings", which made making the different characters very restricting. there's also little problems with the level design, such as certain "chunks" being misused at some points and also Labyrinth Zone being not as edited as the other zones

i think one of the biggest mistakes i made with this game is with the jimmy neutron sprite... You See, in the original Sonic 1, the Newton badnik has two variants with different behaviors. one uses the first palette line, which contains the colors used for Sonic and most of the objects in the game. the Other varient uses a separate palette line specific to Green Hill Zone, which gives it a more green color scheme. You See.. the jimmy neutron sprite wasnt implemented until the Very End of the game's development... and i never bothered to check the other variant of the jimmy neutron sprite to see if it worked with the new palette and Um..

Yeah . it is not supposed to look like that. this is something that i didnt realize until awhile ago when i replayed the hack for this post. i feel pretty stupid for not noticing it sooner.

anyways. part of what made me hate this game for awhile is The Humor. you see, when it came out, a lot of the people in the hacking community thought it was Unfunny and Dumb. So, by extension, i also started Hating it for being a Dumb and Unfunny rom hack. And well... i made this hack when i was 13, so there Are a lot of dumb unfunny stuff in this hack, like replacing the Points sprite with 'GAY', or having one of the sprites be of ken penders' face.

a lot of things in this hack havent aged well, but i think ive grown to accept this hack's existence. its one of the first things ive made that got Some sort of public knowledge, even if still very few people have played it. And i think, if it werent for me making this hack and joining the hacking community, i wouldnt have ended up in the crazy situation i am in today..

i may joke about askin people if theyve heard of pepsi in sonic 1, and although i would prefer if people checked out my newer stuff, i also hope at least Some One, Some Where, can appreciate the dumb little hack i made. this hack was very important to me when i made it, it was made before i even fully interacted with the hacking community. it has all sorts of dumb little ideas that i tried to do despite all the restrictions i had.. and it was a little soul crushing back then when no one payed much attention to the game i spent Months working on. nowadays, i think ive come to accept being a niche little game dev.. but also i cant help but wonder if there are people out there who like my strange little creations as much as i do...

anyways. Idont know. i probably am missing out a lot of things that i wanted to say. this whole thing is probably incomprehensible (i am currently writing this paragraph at 1 am on November 13). it has been Very Hard for me to Do Things or to even Write Down my thoughts on things. but i hope you appreciate this little thing i wrote about the thing i made.

Oh, And By the Way, pepsi in sonic 1 is open source on github. mostly for archival reasons but if for some reason you wish to mess around with it... it is there for u to do whatever u want with it. Lol.

that is all. goopbye

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