After SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter was finally dumped, we thought that we had ROMS of all known Sonic arcade titles... until a photo from Japan's Amusement Machine Show 1993 (or 1994) was discovered on a Japanese Twitter user's account.
https://twitter.com/Tonya_Plan/status/581748240795602944/photo/1![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CBLI8SEUQAAZaWy.jpg)
Yes, it appears to be a previously unknown Sonic arcade machine! It's called "
SegaSonic Watame Scramble" (セガソニックわたあめスクランブル), "watame" being the Japanese word for cotton candy / candy floss. It seems to be a sister machine to SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, and much like it's cousin, makes/dispenses cotton candy while players interact with a Sonic-themed minigame. The original patent application for the machine has been found online here:
https://astamuse.com/ja/published/JP/No/2000194909It contains a complete synopsis of the game (in Japanese). According to a rough machine translation, the player helps Sonic and Tails "make" the cotton candy by launching their famous biplane into the sky and flying it through the fluffy white clouds so that Sonic can collect them on a cotton candy stick. Rainclouds, thunder clouds, and clouds which Dr. Eggman is riding on should be avoided. When the real cotton candy is ready to be dispensed (after about 60 seconds), the plane "runs out of fuel" and lands so that Sonic can "give" the player the cotton candy he's collected.
So we know that this game exists, and given the time period in which it was made, it almost certainly runs on Sega's C2 board. I doubt that very many units were produced, but a poster over at at the Sonic Retro forums claims to have seen other photos of this machine posted on Twitter from public places in Japan, so there are probably a rare few boards still out there. I would
love to see a dump of this someday.