One thing that we absolutely love about video games is that you can play a particular title hundreds (maybe even thousands) of times over a roughly 30 year period, and still find yourself occasionally encountering something "new" decades later that you'd never even noticed on all your previous playthroughs.
Take, for example, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis. It's a game that we're betting a lot of you have played over and over and feel that you have a pretty good knowledge of — and so did we. But recently, we stumbled across this interesting BlueSky post from a user named Feld Four that resurfaced a weird audio bug present on Sonic 3's file screen that we've personally never encountered before — and we're betting many of you probably haven't either — which sees the music in the game change after precisely 47 minutes.
This is believed to be the result of a rogue counter, which sees one of the background instruments get quieter and quieter over time, before wrapping back around and playing at a much louder volume than originally intended.
The bug has apparently been known about since at least 2005 and has resurfaced a few times in the past, including in 2010, when a user on the SonicRetro forums named Deef posted about encountering it, causing an individual called Espyo to post a video of the bug on YouTube.
It recently surfaced again, however, thanks to a prompt from the "game history enthusiast" marina • vgd, who asked people on BlueSky for the "most useless piece of video game knowledge" they know. This led Feld Four to share the piece of trivia, and for a bunch of other people on the site to post comments to either express their amazement at the obscure bug or state that they, too, were already aware of it.
"Sonic 3 and knuckles just keeps on giving" wrote Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield, posting a video of the bug online.
Meanwhile, another commenter commented, "Holy shit this is fantastic and I never knew this. Leaving my Genesis on now, lol"