Ultimate Works... The Altered Beast

Greetings Ultimate Works pre-orderer,

As I write, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Ultimate Works – the expanded, definitive version of ROM’s classic retrospective of the 18-bit powerhouse console – is now in production. In a book-publishing equivalent of Sonic & Knuckles lock-on technology, Ultimate Works adds 48 pages of newly-discovered archive material collected over the years since the book was first published as Collected Works back in 2012. 

At 384 pages, Ultimate Works will be sure to keep you occupied when it arrives in late Spring this year (we’ll be following up with an exact shipping schedule as soon as we have it). Until then, here are a selection of some of the new inclusions, to whet your appetite… 

Bare Knuckle III/Streets of Rage 3

The Japanese box art for Bare Knuckle III/Streets of Rage 3 is a personal all-time favourite of mine, and an artwork that eluded us while we were researching Collected Works, so I’m delighted we can finally include it in all its wraparound glory. The back-cover artwork, featuring the game’s antagonists in silhouette against a burning Wood Oak City embodies 1990s SEGA panache at its finest. 

Vectorman 2 and Alien Soldier

Part of the challenge of designing a book full of such expressive artworks – sometimes hyper-realistic, sometimes cartoony, sometimes kitsch – is placing them together on spreads in a way that works harmoniously. These two new additions – a 3D-rendered artwork for the Vectorman 2 box and a hand-drawn illustration for the boss-rush classic Alien Soldier – pair up beautifully as offbeat gems from the console’s impressive action-game library. 

Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi and The Super Shinobi II/Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

These two artworks were often mentioned by fans as notable omissions from Collected Works, so finding them both in the years since publication and pairing them together on this spread will surely satisfy fans of Joe Musashi (and Yamato 🐕). Also, it’s only just clicked with me that the imposing shadow in this artwork owes a heavy debt to the famous ‘crotch shot’ scene in Robocop. Now if only somebody would make a Robocop/Shinobi crossover… oh wait, that’s ESWAT. As you were. 

Pixel art explosion animations

The pixel art encyclopaedia section of Collected Works was by far the most intensive part of making the first book. Many months were spent extracting sprites and backgrounds and experimenting with layouts until it all felt right. Due to time and space constraints (and my own sanity) I had to put aside some ideas I had for this section – until now! Needlessly indulgent, I know, but I have always found 8- and 16-bit explosion animations to be beautiful examples of the pixel art medium, so I saw fit to showcase some of the Mega Drive/Genesis’s finest examples on this spread. Can you name them from memory? The first person in the comments to name them correctly wins a rare ROM archive item. No joke. 

I hope you are suitably psyched for the arrival of your Blast Processing Bible in a few months. If you have any questions at all about the book, please do leave them in the comments or drop me a line at darren@readonlymemory.com. 

Darren Wall
Editor-in-chief

Read-Only Memory
readonlymemory.com