Introduction
A long time ago in the ancient year of 1999, the revolutionary minds at SEGA of America had an amazing idea. As a promotional deal with Hollywood Video (and Blockbuster if you're Canadian), they would send out pre-release versions of Sonic Adventure for rental at their stores. This promotion became even more interesting once you remember that Sonic Adventure was a launch title for the Dreamcast, so these rental stores also had to rent out Sega Dreamcast's months before their official release in America!

Now, in retrospect, there was one small problem with this: it was a PRE-RELEASE VERSION of Sonic Adventure. Although Sonic Adventure was released in Japan almost 7 months prior to this promotion, this game is BUGGY. When I say buggy, I mean you can clip through A LOT of geometry without intent, power ups like the light-speed dash barely function, and it has SEVERAL softlocks throughout each of the 6 stories.

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Last Updated July 12th, 2026
I am still actively playing through this version. Due to it being full of game-locking issues, I will have to try and work around them. This page will be actively updated until I am done with it!

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Changes from Release
Before we get to the bugs, lets talk about whats different in SA1 Limited Edition to the released version of SA1?

The most deliberate difference between SA1:LE and SA1 is that in the Limited Edition online features are disabled, being greyed out in the home menu.
For more subtle changes, Sonic's running animation now displays him with blurred feet 'to simulate speed', and the Casinopolis Cowgirl easter egg was censored/removed.
Most entertainingly is that the English lip sync (yes, SA1 actually had English lip sync. It's different than the Japanese version) was not finished yet, meaning that Limited Edition has the Japanese sync with the English Dub, creating even worse lined up cutscenes than the original.
I would also like to state this as I've seen some misinformation about this game; This is NOT a demo, the entire game is on the disc and is technically beatable. You can also save the game. I've seen some people say you cannot save or beat the game and that is not true.

Those are the primary changes that Sonic Team meant to make, now lets get into some of the less-intentional changes.

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The Bugs
(To be continued...)

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