This is an archive of past SRB2 versions. The files provided here are for personal amusement and nostalgia, so don’t ask for help getting them working. If you have the original installer to a version listed as missing, we’d love to hear from you.

The crappy original! This started it all. Can you believe it? We sure can’t. While this game is pretty unplayable without cheating for extra lives, there’s a cheat menu if you click the upper right corner of the title screen. Passwords:

This was SRB2’s first release, based on Doom Legacy v1.28, updated to Windows and including an extra level. This is essentially a proof of concept release, as programming had begun only 45 days beforehand. A lot of the features back then still retained their Doom origins; at this stage, Sonic was the only playable character and could do little more than collect rings and jump.

The Christmas series of releases expand upon the proof of concept, providing actual level design and more Sonic-like gameplay. The initial release, v0.90, was incredibly buggy and crashed constantly. As the releases went on they became more stable and added new features, such as the thok, monitors, Tails and his flight, and the Sonic 2 styled HUD. v0.96 included lots of new level content and was originally given to contest winners in September 2000 as a special edition CD, but it was released approximately one year later to the public and has been updated to a Windows version.

With people knocking down our proverbial doors wanting something new, this demo was released as a preview to Demo 2. Demo 1 only contained an incomplete version of Greenflower Zone, Act 1 as Sonic, but the engine was much more stable at this point and had been ported to Doom Legacy v1.30.

Demo 2 was the first proper release, providing four full playable acts, all 3 acts of Greenflwer Zone and Techno Hill Zone, Act 1. It included a new title screen and new menu graphics that are still used to this day, along with complete sprites for Sonic and Tails. Knuckles was also added to the game, but without sprites, and could glide but not climb. Demo 2 also introduced the concept of match play with Meadow Match Zone as an external WAD file.

Demo 3 was a refinement of Demo 2, introducing multiplayer gametypes (at the time, Match, Race, and Tag) to the game. Five match stages were added to the game to support the new modes. Techno Hill Zone, Act 1 was also updated, fixing the extremely difficult ending and making the slime painful.

Demo 4, quickly patched to 4.1, introduced ring collection special stages and all three acts of the original version of Castle Eggman Zone as a secret zone unlocked by collecting all the emeralds. The special stages simply required the player to grab a certain amount of rings within a time limit. It also introduced the capture the flag multiplayer gametype and secrets based on the system clock. Knuckles’s climbing and Super Sonic were also implemented, although neither had proper sprites yet. In 4.1, a placeholder Knuckles sprite set was introduced to replace the mishmash of other character sprites he had been using before.

Demo 4.32, quickly patched to 4.35, was an update of Demo 4 that ported the game from Doom Legacy 1.30 to 1.32, fixing a lot of bugs in the game. It also introduced the character select screen and replaced the excessively difficult special stages with more reasonable ones.

SRB2 Tournament 2003 *MISSING!*March 2003

SRB2 Tournament 2003 was a multiplayer-only public beta release designed to test the then-new timer-based match weapon system and the ill-fated chaos multiplayer gametype. There are also many of the engine improvements from Final Demo already in place, such as the initial version of level headers, allowing the multiplayer levels to have names for the first time. The demo’s name is a reference to the then-current Unreal Tournament 2003, a popular multiplayer shooter at the time.

Final Demo 1.01, later patched to 1.04, introduced acts 2 and 3 of Techno Hill Zone and made Castle Eggman Zone a proper stage instead of a secret, expanding the total number of acts in the game to nine. Many of the extra modes in the game were introduced as secrets here, such as Spring Hill as a NiGHTS mode demonstration and Mario Koopa Blast as a 2D mode demonstration. Also introduced was the finalized level header system, allowing modders to name maps and set various things like sky and music, heralding the start of serious modding of SRB2.

Final Demo 1.08 was another patch to the Final Demo cycle, but is notable for clearing up a lot of the patching issues earlier Final Demo versions had as well as finally displaying a version number related to the demo title. It also removed the multithok, restricting Sonic to only using the thok once per jump.

Final Demo 1.09, later patched to 1.09.2 and 1.09.4, was the final patch cycle of the perpetually badly-named Final Demo release cycle. 1.09 removed Knuckles’s ability to glide multiple times per jump, as well as finally removing the ill-fated chaos multiplayer mode. Super Sonic finally got proper sprites in this release, as well. An extremely large number of modding features were added in this cycle, leading to a flourishing modding scene for 1.09.4.

IRC Match Beta *MISSING!*February 2008

Before the release of 2.0, there was a small private test of the match multiplayer mode released to the #srb2fun IRC channel. This beta included the new match and capture the flag weapon systems, but was intentionally locked from being able to load WAD files, restricting its usefulness for anything but testing multiplayer.

Version 2.0 was a complete restructuring of the game, including a dramatically expanded single player campaign, introducing nine new stages along with seven old ones. The multiplayer gametypes of match and capture the flag were completely revamped with a new weapon system among several other system changes and features. So much changed in this update that it would be easier to detail the things that didn’t change over what did.