Lock-on Technology
If blast processing didn’t hook you in, gaming’s buzzword of Christmas 1994 surely did the trick. It’s hard to quantify exactly how massive the advent of lock-on technology felt when it was first unveiled. By placing copies of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or 3 into the slot atop the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge, you were not only able to unlock more levels, but retroactively add Knuckles into existing games. Even ignoring the fact that your cartridges were precariously stacked into the Sega Genesis like a perverse game of Jenga, we were convinced that this was the future of gaming.
Alas, nothing more eventuated from lock-on technology. Inserting other games into the slot results in an error screen, wherein Sonic and his cronies would mock you for your misdeed. Inputting a code allowed you to access Sonic 3’s special stages, but nothing more than that. So if you had bold ambitions of using Knuckles in Street Fighter 2 or Splatterhouse, you were going to walk away disappointed.
Expansions are still doing the rounds of gaming to this day, breathing new life into games that are otherwise past their expiration date, a la the decaying husk of World of Warcraft. But it was never quite so spectacular as it was back when Sega showed us that two is always better than one.
