News/Happy Halloween 2026! A Journey Through STI's Early Years
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Hidden Palace and DevStash present
Ashley, Travis, and Kat are back with another spooky Sega Technical Institute release. We've been working with one of the studio's early programmers to recover a sizable collection of material from his old floppy disks. This collection includes prototypes, source code, and related material spanning six STI projects, most of which have never been seen before. Before we get to the games, however, it's worth getting to know the man who held onto them all these years.
Ken Rose got his start programming on a PDP-8 in high school before studying computer science at UC Berkeley. Through the 1980s he worked as a contractor for Synapse Software, SofTalent, and Atari, porting titles such as Protector II to the Commodore 64 and Battlezone and Desert Falcon to Atari's 8-bit machines. In June 1991, a headhunter put him in touch with Mark Cerny, who hired him as a senior programmer at Sega Technical Institute.
Over the next three years, Ken worked on a string of STI projects that were cancelled one after another, with Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball the only one to reach store shelves. Along the way he introduced the concept of source code control to the studio and wrote STI's first game programmed in C. After a strained relationship with STI head Roger Hector, Ken was let go on February 2, 1994 - the release date of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. He went on to develop for the Jaguar at Atari Corporation, and later on the Nuon at Richard Miller's VM Labs. He now helps the IEEE Computer Society develop software developer certification exams.
In December 2025, DevStash founder Ashley Rojas interviewed Ken on his career. Following the interview, Ken dug through his old floppy disks for any surviving Sega material, sending Ashley builds and source code spanning projects from 1990 to 1994. We'd like to extend our sincerest thanks to Ken for allowing us to preserve so much history.
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Jester, the working title for what would later become Kinetix, was the brainchild of STI artist and designer Rick Macaraeg, with programming by Scott Chandler and art by Alan Ackerman, Brenda Ross, and Macaraeg himself. Its premise was a game without enemies: players navigated stages full of environmental hazards which would squish, burn, and otherwise maim Jester's malleable clay body, with the comedy coming from his many deaths.
Starting development in 1991, and seemingly predating Sonic 2, Jester was seen as one of Sega Technical Institute's premier titles of the era. Beloved by both its development team and the larger body of STI staff, the project would undergo a roughly three-year development cycle with a planned release date in April 1994. Jester was even once set to appear on STI's Christmas card alongside Sonic, Tails, and Kid Chameleon.
Unfortunately, despite reportedly nearing completion, Jester was eventually cancelled. STI artist Craig Stitt speculates it was shelved due to the departure of Cerny (who had served as the game's designer and likely its producer) from Sega, as well as the replacement producer's lack of interest in finishing the project.
While Ken didn't work on Jester, his disks still contain a playable April 1991 build of the game. This build showcases a number of unique mechanics only hinted at in magazine screenshots, such as the ability to turn into a bouncing ball and enter tubes to be transported around the stage. There's far more here than we expected.
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Dark Empires source code at Hidden Palace
Dark Empires source code at Sega Retro
Ken's first assignment at STI was as lead programmer of Dark Empires, Bill Dunn's fantasy tactical strategy game, basing his work on Dick Tracy programmer Mike Schwartz' existing Genesis code. Written in assembly alongside junior programmer Scott Chandler, Dark Empires was the project where Ken pushed STI to adopt source code control - sparing his team the week-long manual code merges that had plagued Kid Chameleon's development. However, Sega and Mark Cerny wanted to focus the studio's efforts on more marketable projects and pulled the plug on the niche title.
Ken's disks contain the same September 1991 build we released last Halloween. More notable, however, is the game's source code! There's some juicy stuff here, like a list of unit names. Unfortunately, it fails to compile due to missing assets, but it's likely the same build we already have.
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Kid Chameleon (Prototype B) at Hidden Palace
Kid Chameleon (Prototype B) at Sega Retro
STI's first original game, Kid Chameleon began development in 1990 as part of Cerny's push to create a character-driven blockbuster franchise, and was released in 1992.
While Ken didn't work on Kid Chameleon either, his disks still contain a unique December 1991 build of the game. This build is largely identical to the existing December 1991 build, but contains leftover data which matches the existing Dark Empires prototype 1:1.
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Following Dark Empires' cancellation, STI looked for something its team could put out in the roughly nine months before the 1992 Christmas season. The answer was B-Bomb, a vertically oriented, Joust-like platformer conceived by Rick Macaraeg. Standing for "Butt-Bomb" - named for the player's method of squashing enemies by dropping on them from above - the game featured Ken and Chandler on programming, with design by Craig Stitt and sprites by Brenda Ross. Ken convinced a hesitant Cerny to let him write the game in C, with the studio's Western projects generally adopting the language for future games. Although shown at Summer CES 1992, the game was cancelled after about half a year in development for similar reasons to Dark Empires - not being an "A title". In Ken's words, "We were trying to take this group of people and build something that would sell by Christmas, and we'd have been thrilled with a B-minus title."
Thankfully, Ken's disks contain a July 1992 build of the game. This one's quite playable and even fun, and made it further into development than anyone had expected. If you give any of these titles a shot, make sure it's B-Bomb.
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Treasure Tails at Hidden Palace
Treasure Tails at Sonic Retro
Treasure Tails source code at Hidden Palace
Treasure Tails source code at Sonic Retro
In December 1992, Sega of America management asked STI for a short, simple Tails game for the following Christmas. The result, Treasure Tails, was an isometric puzzle-adventure set in a maze-like world, with Ken as lead programmer alongside Earl Stratton, with Hoyt Ng on design and Craig Stitt as its only artist. When Stitt grew worried about his workload, Ken had him tally every animation needed to complete the project, but the estimate came to roughly four years of art. The pair took the numbers to Roger Hector, and unsurprisingly the game was cancelled on April 16, 1993, with the game's staff being moved to Spinball - where Ken would program the game's bonus rounds.
Curiously, an included design document indicates the game was meant to be a tie-in to the television show Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Like Sonic Spinball and the corresponding Adventures episode "Attack on Pinball Fortress", Treasure Tails would have tied into a specific episode of the show: "Tails' Tale", in which Tails goes on a solo adventure through an ancient temple and eventually squares off with a villain named Comomatz. Which came first, the episodes or the games? Considering Mean Bean and Sonic-16, it makes you wonder how many TV show tie-ins Sega management had planned.
As the game's primary programmer, Ken's disks contain an April 1993 build of the game, along with source code and a handful of design documents. Where are the temple graphics? Craig had originally described the appearance of Treasure Tails in his 1995 video resume as consisting exclusively of Digitizer mockups. While these graphics were created, we're not sure they were programmed into the game before the creation of this prototype and the project's cancellation.
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Segapede (January 25, 1994 prototype) at Hidden Palace
Segapede (January 25, 1994 prototype) at Sega Retro
Segapede source code at Hidden Palace
Segapede source code at Sega Retro
Segapede was conceived by Craig Stitt and first pitched in September 1993. Ken programmed its playable demo over three or four months, building the physics that linked Zipp's trailing segments and the rest of the demo's engine. While the project was greenlit, Ken's firing in February 1994 left him unable to finish it, and the project - later renamed Astropede - was eventually shelved due to mismanagement. Regardless, Ken still counts it among the work he is proudest of.
His disks contain both the existing June 1994 build and Segapede's source code. When compiled, the result is an even earlier build from January 1994 with a unique stage layout! This source includes some neat goodies, like a segment of Sonic Spinball collision code, header info from Dark Empires, Jester, B-Bomb, and Treasure Tails, the entire kernel program for B-Bomb, and even GEMS 2.2!
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Ashley Rojas
Coordination | Interview | Research
MDTravis
Research | Reverse Engineering
Katsushimi
Research | Reverse Engineering
vladikcomper
Reverse Engineering
Ken Rose
For making this all possible