Submission Text Full Submission Page
It all started with a simple question. "Do you think you could complete a Sonic game without collecting a single ring?"
Three years, two GMVs and one echidna later, the end result is here for all to see.
This run is performed on a hacked version of Sonic 1, allowing the player to play as Knuckles, which Sega should've been able to let you do back in 1994. The official thread for the game is here.

Run description

This run has three main goals. They're a bit like the three laws of robotics in that they're dependent on each other. They are:
  1. Avoid all rings, and any other items that would permit me to take damage (shield, invincibility)
  2. Don't fly over the top (or zip to the end) of the level because that would be boring (thanks CrazyTerabyte), except where not doing so would force you to collect rings
  3. Fastest time given the above two conditions
and other criteria:
  • Takes no damage (obviously)
  • Ignores delays caused by bonus effects
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • Makes speed/entertainment tradeoffs
  • Is a concept demo
Given that the focus of the movie was already not going to be blindly speeding through the game, I felt the second point was necessary to make the best movie. Otherwise you'd just be climbing over the whole of Marble Zone which looks clever once, but boring after that.

Emulator information

Gens 9.5b was used to record this run. At times I also used Upthorn's hacked-specifically-for-Sonic-1 version, which proved intriguing without being essential.

Level times

Level times were as follows:
LevelTime
Green Hill 10:21
Green Hill 20:15
Green Hill 30:31
Marble 10:39
Marble 20:24
Marble 31:09
Spring Yard 10:20
Spring Yard 20:25
Spring Yard 31:04
Labyrinth 10:23
Labyrinth 20:26
Labyrinth 30:51
Star Light 10:19
Star Light 20:15
Star Light 30:40
Scrap Brain 10:27
Scrap Brain 20:32
Scrap Brain 30:13
Final Zone1:12
Total Game Time10:26
These times shouldn't be compared with JXQ's run for obvious reasons. There are a few levels in which he does not collect rings (of which the most comparable is Labyrinth 2) but I take different paths to him by choice (see the run's goals above).

Level notes

Green Hill 1 Nothing really special here. The first superglide gets used here - you're gonna see that a lot. My first attempt at this run picked up the shield, but I changed my goals to disallow this strategy.
Green Hill 2 I had to make a big choice at the start of this level. I initially wanted my first condition to be to ignore all items, but it lost so much time from the lack of speed shoes that it was no longer as entertaining, so I compromised. This level wouldn't be nearly as awesome under a no-item condition.
Green Hill 3 More speed shoe action. I don't consider the bouncing off the enemy skipping a large portion of the level, given it's only one enemy and Sonic can do it anyway. It must be said, though, that disallowing the invincibility renders the over-the-top boss strategy impossible, so I had to improvise a little. Oh, and the boss is totally awesome.
Marble 1 If you're wondering why I jumped over the rising/falling platform at about seven seconds, it was already out of position and I figured I may as well play around a bit. This level actually makes climbing up walls look interesting - no mean feat.
Marble 2 A forced skip here - if you take the regular path, you'll find a switch with two rings above the platform it lowers. You can't go past without tagging one of them. Oh, and the ending score here is just perfect.
Marble 3 At about five seconds, I need a perfectly timed five-tap spindash to just sneak under the purple block and also land on the next weight. Unfortunately, you can't skip the huge section of lava when you go this way. Around 43 seconds is where the real fun begins - three consecutive superglides, for height and then distance.
Spring Yard 1 Superglide off the speed shoe saves unnecessary, boring wall climbing. This is also a forced skip, taking the lower path forces you onto a spring which sends you into rings, with no opportunity to jump or significantly alter your trajectory. The section at 17 seconds, weaving in and out of rings, enemies, and that tricky little hole at the end, was all done in one take!
Spring Yard 2 Those bumpers are very annoying. When I went to redo this level (as the first attempt was slower than my old run), I ended up having to try and find the exact speed and timing to get through the second bumper a second time. This was a task I did not relish, so I found a different way through.
Spring Yard 3 I'll forgive you for skipping this one, it's pretty boring. Another forced skip means I have to climb up the wall for five seconds instead of just jumping up onto the angled platform at the top of the level. Another forced skip at the end led to using two superglides instead of just one, leaving the platform at the end perfectly positioned.
Labyrinth 1 Nothing to see here.
Labyrinth 2 Practically identical to JXQ (I tried to avoid this where possible). I think I was ahead before the skip but the door balances that out. I tried to link this skip with the Sonic skip, but using Upthorn's modified emulator I was able to see that that wouldn't work.
Labyrinth 3 The normal path on this level has no rings, so I tried to make it interesting. I think I did a reasonable job on the "boss".
Star Light 1 Pretty standard fare. However you can't seem to hit the 10k flag on this level (or SL2 for that matter). I would've thought they would adjust that for Knuckles, but whatever...
Star Light 2 Coming up with a good strategy for the sinewaves without being able to touch the rings was interesting. I eventually came up with holding left for a single frame so that I didn't hit the part of the curve that made you stop dead.
Star Light 3 Completely the opposite of the path you might expect, because every other path has a loop in it. At 27 seconds I make a jump which seems superfluous, but it sets me up to kill the orbinaut which otherwise would kill me.
Scrap Brain 1 Possibly my favourite trick in the whole run. All paths on this level require you to go through a tube with rings in it, and you can't climb over the top. So what do you do? Go through the rings, of course! Afterwards, I set up my spindash from the left side so that the flamethrowers play nice.
Scrap Brain 2 Surprisingly, nothing special here, except for the transition which I think I did quicker than anyone else has before.
Scrap Brain 3 At seven seconds I pass directly through a bullet. Yeah, I'm cool. (The hitbox is actually behind it!)
Final Zone Nothing to see here. I even ran out of tricks and started using them over. Input ends halfway up the jump to Robotnik's ship. I couldn't let him get away that easily :)

Special thanks

I always used to know when you were near the end of the credits because you saw "special thanks". Rest assured, there's not too far to go.
  • Upthorn - for being a source of ideas, providing me with the Sonic 1 modified Gens (twice!) and generally helping me keep my head on straight
  • JXQ - for the excellent Knuckles TAS that preceded this, and in doing so finding the Labyrinth 2 skip (the last piece in the puzzle for a no-ring completion at the time)
  • MK - the original inspiration for the run, we ran through levels in real time for days testing the feasibility of such a run on an "official" release. However no official releases permitted such a condition, which is why the run is on this game
  • Everyone who watched my WIPs, you know who you are
  • The folks over at The Sonic Center for all the awesome strategies, and all the great times I've had
Enjoy!

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. I'm not sure I got the right ROM though. (I tried Sonic The Hedgehog with Knuckles (S1 Hack).gen, which was the closest match to what you wrote.) Well, here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.

Bisqwit: NVA's guess was wrong, so I undid its screenshot list.

Truncated: I will reject this due to the somewhat arbitrary rules and not all too positive feedback. See mmbossman's and others replies in the thread.

Mitjitsu
He/Him
Banned User, Experienced player (531)
Joined: 4/24/2006
Posts: 2997
Raiscan wrote:
voting thingy wrote:
Vote: Did you like watching this movie? (Vote after watching!)
Seriously, you either enjoyed it or you didn't..
Its not that black and white an issue.
mmbossman wrote:
However, instead of a blanket statement, would you please provide some examples of suboptimal technique for future consideration?
I have in the past but people just tried to make my claims sound either invalid or insignificant. Even though it turned out I couldn't have been more right such as this case . In this case just watching the current published Sonic 2 or S1K run will be a good enough guide to an accomplished TASer like yourself. The errors aren't so easily summarized like the link in my previous paragraph, while each individual error and imprecision might be a few frames worth there adding up to many seconds.
Joined: 1/23/2006
Posts: 352
Location: Germany
I was faced with too many uncertainities about the movie to really enjoy it, for one I couldn't really assess what the hack did and which moves were through superhuman play and which just through sloppy coding on the part of the hack author (there seemed to be places where the spindash was used to glitch through walls, as the unhacked game does not have the move it's not apparent if the spindash was just badly hacked in). The other uncertainity was when a skipping route was allowed, making skips feel kinda like rule violations (of a self-set goal) because you cannot verify if they are actually necessary. It makes the path feel arbitrary and forced, I almost feel that it would have felt more consistent to just skip as much as possible so there's no doubt that you didn't violate your own rule.
Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5769
Location: Away
AKA wrote:
Even though it turned out I couldn't have been more right such as this case.
Could you please elaborate on which of your assessments from the linked post have been confirmed to be right?
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Joined: 2/25/2006
Posts: 407
KDR_11k wrote:
I voted no, I found the whole thing too arbitrary. First you set a fairly arbitrary goal, then you use a hack that vastly increases the character's abilities, then you add this weird "uses normal route except where that would collect rings" goal.
/me points to rule #3
Ryzen 3700X, ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard, 32GB 3600MHz RAM, MSI Geforce 1070Ti 8GB, Windows 10 Pro x64 http://tasvideos.org/Nach/FranpaAlert.html
Active player (277)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Raiscan wrote:
I've always been under the impression that it's up to Judges to work out whether the run follows the rules of the site, and the public to tell the judges if the run was enjoyable or not. While a fair few people have said they enjoyed the run, they either water it down to a meh or go as far as no as if they're saying "its a good run but keep it off my internetz!". Seriously, you either enjoyed it or you didn't..
What if my ability to enjoy a movie hinges on whether it should appear on nesvideos
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Player (120)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
A good watch. I liked the longer, more familiar routes when they were possible; it's sad that they weren't available more often. Knuckles really does abuse this game, which is fun to see as well. But, the no-rings goal would be much better if it could be pulled off by Sonic in a "real" game. So, I'm basically just repeating a lot of what has been said before me :) Good show Mr. mike, looking forward to more Sonic madness from you.
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Joined: 5/9/2006
Posts: 6
I liked it and I think you can come up with a story for the sonic version, as in, if there were 49 impossible not to catch rings, "Harrr sonic, if you catch 50 of my infected rings, you will explode, taking the whole planet with you" and then someone could add a counter to the avi or something. I like themed tass.
Banned User
Joined: 8/2/2008
Posts: 420
Location: italy
stickyman05 wrote:
Your next mission, if you choose to accept it, is a no rings, all emeralds run. GO!
You can do that in my hack. Back on topic, I'd vote yes on this, but I can't vote yet.
Gone.
Joined: 4/14/2010
Posts: 146
Location: France
Flygon wrote:
Youtube video: Part 1 is up: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XWiQWwdk5vc Part 2 is up: http://youtube.com/watch?v=qhcmjq3eRpg
Flygon, what happened to your videos? Would it be possible that you re-upload them, if you still have them on your comp? Thanks. Actually, this movie doesn't have any encode on the gruefood delight page yet, it's why I'm asking you that.
TASVideosGrue
They/Them
Joined: 10/1/2008
Posts: 2728
Location: The dark corners of the TASVideos server
om, nom, nom... blech, stale!
Joined: 4/14/2010
Posts: 146
Location: France
Editor, Player, Publisher (46)
Joined: 10/15/2021
Posts: 366
YouTube encode: Link to video