Ken Rose's floppy disks bring back B-Bomb, Treasure Tails and four more lost Sega Technical Institute projects
Hidden Palace and DevStash have released prototypes, source code and design documents from the disks of Ken Rose, who worked at Sega Technical Institute from 1991. Two of the games had never been s...
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A box of old floppy disks has turned up six projects from Sega Technical Institute, the American studio that made Sonic 2 and Sonic Spinball. The disks belong to Ken Rose, a programmer Mark Cerny brought into STI in June 1991. Hidden Palace published what was on them as its Halloween 2026 release, and two of the games had never been seen running outside the studio.
The find came out of an interview. According to Handheld Hideout, Ashley Rojas, who founded the preservation group DevStash, interviewed Rose about a long career in games in December 2025. Afterwards Rose went through the old disks looking for any Sega work that had survived, and shared what was there. Of everything Rose led at STI, only Sonic Spinball ever reached the shops.
What was on the disks
- B-Bomb: a vertical platformer in the style of Joust, where you beat enemies by landing on them. The name was short for Butt-Bomb. It was STI's first project written in C, it was shown at Summer CES in 1992, and it was cancelled after about half a year. The recovered build is dated 2 October 1992, and Hidden Palace calls it quite playable and fun.
- Treasure Tails: an isometric puzzle adventure starring Tails, asked for by Sega of America for Christmas 1993 and tied to the cartoon episode Tails' Tale. It was cancelled on 16 April 1993, after the art was estimated at around four years of work. The release has a prototype dated 6 April 1993, its source code and the design documents. The team then moved on to Sonic Spinball.
- Jester: a platformer with no enemies, only hazards that hurt the hero's clay body, first called Kinetix. The 12 February 1993 build shows the bouncing ball form and tube travel that until now were known only from magazine screenshots. Rose did not work on this one; the build was simply on the disks.
- Segapede, later renamed Astropede: a platformer whose hero, Zipp, moves on linked body segments, with segment physics Rose wrote. A February 1994 prototype was already out. The source on the disks has now been compiled into an earlier build, dated 25 January 1994, with a different stage layout.
- Dark Empires: source code for the fantasy strategy game, whose May 1992 prototype was released last Halloween. Some assets are missing, so it does not compile yet.
- Kid Chameleon: a previously unknown build of the 1992 game, close to a December 1991 prototype, with leftover Dark Empires data inside it.
The Segapede source builds today
The Segapede files also hold Sonic Spinball collision code, the B-Bomb kernel and version 2.2 of GEMS, the sound system Sega gave Mega Drive developers. A restored copy of the source is on GitHub, lightly changed so it compiles. You mount the folder in DOSBox, run a setup script that drops you into FreeDOS, and run make. The result is a ROM that boots in an emulator, and the untouched original source sits alongside it in a zip.
Hidden Palace credits Ashley Rojas for coordination and research, MDTravis and Katsushimi for research and reverse engineering, and vladikcomper for reverse engineering. Handheld Hideout noted on 4 November that several of the download links on the prototype pages were returning errors, so if one fails, try again later.
Sources
- Happy Halloween 2026! A Journey Through STI's Early Years (Hidden Palace)
- A Former Sega Developer Has Helped Recover Games Lost for More Than 30 Years (Handheld Hideout)
- Discussion: A Former Sega Developer Has Helped Recover Games Lost for More Than 30 Years (Reddit)
- Mega-Mark-V/segapede: source code to the Jan 25, 1994 prototype of Segapede (GitHub)
Image: Image: Hidden Palace