The disk had one file on it: "Sonic.exe". I was never much of a Sonic fan, in fact I owned a GameCube, but Kyle had been a super-fan of the series, so I'd played the third game on his Sega Genesis. Opening the game, the intro was from the first game (I'd seen a clip on YouTube), but Sonic didn't pop up at all. Weird. The game loaded in the menu select screen, which was equally as off. Instead of the usual bright, cheery menu I assumed would show up, the sky in the background was a faded, cloudy red, and there were 3 characters to select. Tails, Knuckles, a pink hedgehog I wasn't familiar with, and Eggman. From what little I knew of the Sonic series, I knew that Eggman should not have been playable. Kyle had made a huge deal about how "Eggman was playable for the first time" in Sonic Adventure 2, and I also remembered that Knuckles was a character created for the third game. I wasn't sure about Tails or Amy, but a quick Google search informed me that Tails wasn't a thing until the second game, and the hedgehog, who's name was Amy, was made for the CD game. I sat back in my chair, thinking. If all those characters weren't playable until later entries, why were they all availible here? My best guess was that this was either a ROM hack (being a Mario fan, I had my fair share of experience with Kaizo Mario) or a fangame, since I'd seen a handful of people talking about fangames online. Either way, I picked Tails, since the other three were locked, and the game cut to black, the title cart scrolling in from off screen.