In early 2011, an exhibition known as “The Art of Video Games”[1] was announced to be held the following year (March 16th - September 20th 2012) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Being one of the first exhibitions of it’s kind, it was set to explore the then 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects, the creative use of new technologies, and the most influential artists and designers.

It was decided that a total of 240 games would be included in a ballot, with the 240 games on the ballot were selected by Chris Melissinos, who worked with the museum and an advisory group consisting of game developers, designers, industry pioneers, and journalists. The games were selected based on a variety of criteria, including visual effects, creative use of new technologies, and how the game fit into the narrative of the exhibition. The exhibit went on to have great success, and even toured 10 additional venues throughout the united states.

The public being invited to vote between February 14, 2011 and April 17, 2011 to help select which 80 games out of the 240 would go on to actually be featured at the exhibit. Voting was seperated into different categories such as era, console and genre, usually with the voter being able to select 1 of 3 options for each.

So, you’re probably thinking “Well, that sounds cool, but why are we talking about this?”… Well, I’m glad you asked!

As shown above, under the “Transition era (1995 - 2002)”, the public were able to vote for which Sega Saturn game they liked best for a certain gamegenre… and underneath the “action genre” section, voters were given 3 choices… “Tomb Raider (1995)”, “NiGHTS into dreams…” (1996) and last but not least… “Clockwork Knight” (1995)![2]

Sadly, as also shown above, Tomb Raider went on to win under this category. While this is sad, I personally think it was a great honour for Clockwork Knight to be included in such a prestigious event, and for that I am happy.

REACTIVE was a 1995 British interactive entertainment programme for kids broadcast over 20 episodes on the CBBC segment of BBC1 between July 24th and September 22nd. It starred Rick Adams as the host of the show along side Emma Lee and Peter Burke. A special section of the show was known as the “Computer Game Challenge”. Two callers play a computer game over the phone, their touch-tone pad key-presses being turned into game joypad button-pushes, usually with 45 seconds in which to try and win the challenge. The contestant who did better in 45 seconds would win a decent prize, and the other one wins a Reactive T-shirt. It was seemingly the first (and perhaps only) time such a concept has ever been thought up and put into action (The description of the original video boasts that it was the “first truly interactive show on television”)… could be wrong, but that’s the claim!

The first 5 episodes of the show aired at 9:45 AM, but after the first 5 episodes, the show seemingly took a long break of around 5-6 weeks from July 28th to September 4th, perhaps because they thought thast not enough kids would be watching TV and would be playing outside instead during this time? Eh, it was a different era…
When it came back on September 4th, it had a new after schol friendly time slot of 16:20 PM, meaning way more people could see it and even take part in the show. The previous time of 9:30 AM meant only very young kids and kids who were off school sick could watch/play. Each Episode lasted just 15 minutes. Saturday and Sunday were always skipped. After the September 22nd Episode, the show seems to have been cancelled.

Now, you may well be thinking to yourself “that’s nice and all, but what is this to do with Clockwork Knight?!”…

Well, Episode 09, which aired on 1995.09.07 just happened to feature Clockwork Knight as the playable game, and the two contestants were “Matthew Johnson from Cas-Gwent (Chepstow)” and “Hayley Davis from London”.
For whatever reason, the Player’s had 1 minute to try and win the challenge rather than the usual 45 seconds.
The former contestant was the winner, and won the better prize of some kind of “Talking Camera”.

To note, the above footage came courtesy of Youtube user “R4949”[3]. From a little research, it appears he’s actually one of the people behind the creation of the show, which is cool! For more info on REACTIVE, Rick Adams and the BBC 1 Archived TV Guides that I used while researching this subject, please see the description of the above video on Youtube.

A short clip from the 6th episode of The Retro Hour’s lovely podcast[4], where during an interview with Former DMA Design Limited (Now Rockstar North Limited) co-founder Mike Dailly (The creator of the original MASSIVELY famous GTA and the ever so famous Lemmings), in which he talks about the original influences for the original GTA and it’s top-down engine, which just so happens to include our favourite game… Clockwork Knight!

While it may be strange to hear that Clockwork Knight was influence on a game such as GTA, it will all become clear by listening to this short excerpt of this podcast.

All credit for this interview of course goes to the cool people at “The Retro Hour”, and hopefully they don’t mind me nicking this little clip from their podcast. If the people from “The Retro Hour” see this, feel free to monetise this video as I won’t be doing so, and you deserve to get what is owed to you for your own work. Of course, thank you also to Mike Dailly for doing the interview with them and letting everybody know this cool little fact about Clockwork Knight! To note, this was also discussed in an article on GamesRadar+ (Edge Magazine)’s website.[5]

As a final note, a few GTA focused websites around the internet seem to claim that a cancelled Sega Saturn port of GTA used Clockwork Knight’s engine. This claim is false, and seems to have been a misinterpretation of what was stated in an ancient quote by the game’s lead programmer “Keith Hamilton”.
So far only be able to source the quote to Sega-Saturn.net[6], which is as follows:

In the very early days of GTA, yes - we were also working on a Saturn version.
It was dropped fairly early on so that we could focus on the PC version.
We just didn't have the resources to develop for more than one platform.

The original inspiration for the GTA engine was actually a Saturn game
called Clockwork Night. It had an innovative looking side-on 3D view.

We built a similar engine but then turned it on its side - hence the fact that
GTA could zoom in and out and had buildings with height, yet was otherwise
done with 2D sprites.

As you can see from everything above, GTA never ever used the “Clockwork Knight engine”, and Clockwork Knight was simply an inspiration for the game. Hopefully that one can be laid to rest now!

Now, if we’re talking about Clockwork Knight and Toy Story on the same page, we of course have to talk about the (incorrect) elephant in the room… A seemingly common misconception is that Clockwork Knight was either inspired by and/or went as far as to rip off Toy Story, but the fact of the matter is, the similar ideas seen in Clockwork Knight beat Toy Story to market by almost a year (in Japan at least and several months beforehand in the US and Europe), though the former was far less of an influence in popular culture than the latter.

We of course must adknowledge that when it comes to Clockwork Knight, SEGA were likely inspired by the works of John Lasseter and Pixar, who had been producing groundbreaking computer animated shorts since the mid-1980s (usually based on normally-inanimate objects). That said, so was pretty much everyone else in the industry at that time!
Like Pixar, Sega likely realised that computers of the era was more suited to rendering simple geometric shapes made of plastic or metal, rather than realistic organisms such as animals or humans.

To add, Pixar did in fact release “Tin Toy” in 1988 - a five-minute short featuring Tinny, a tin one-man-band toy, and other senitent toys (which later became a catalyst for Toy Story in 1995). The similarities to Clockwork Knight and this short pretty much end there. The fact of the matter is, Pixar were not the first to bring toys to life, and Toy Story itself seems to have been potentially inspired by others (1986’s “The Christmas Toy” springs to mind)…

In a funny twist to the above, a 2018 episode of the Youtube show “CODING SECRETS” (produced by former Traveller’s Tales founder “Jon Burton”)[10] actually went into detail about a game that he had himself worked on for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis called “Toy Story”… You may have possibly heard of it before! One thing that was always raved about in this game was the “Next-Gen” 3D Depth Effect which were thought somewhat “impossible” on the then aging hardware.

As it would turn out, Clockwork Knight would actually be the inspiration for these amazing effects!

As noted by Jon in the above video, he had been playing Clockwork Knight on the “then new” Sega Saturn. Clockwork Knight itself was of course a cool 3D twist on traditional 2D platforming, showing off what new 32-Bit consoles could do.

The rest of the video goes on to descibe how he felt that he would be able to pull of something similar on the aging 16-Bit Mega Drive/Genesis, and of course how they went about doing so. It was really cool to see Clockwork Knight had in fact inspired this game in some way.

I’d like to finish this part off by being direct that I’m NOT a fan of Toy Story.
While this is true, I can adknowledge how industry changing the movie was, and how well-loved the franchise is. My Wife is a big fan of Toy Story, and we playfully fight about which is the better of the two regularly.
I genuinely feel there is room for both in this world!

The connections to other games don’t end there, and funnily enough, we’re going to yet again refer to someone already mentioned on the page…

During the making of Clockwork Knight (Seemingly the 2nd game), the team had been inspired by a few things in game “Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse” which had actually been worked on by the previously mentioned Jon Burton and his former company Traveler’s Tales. SEGA Japan had actually been very impressed with what TT had done with “Mickey Mania” and “Toy Story” on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, and asked them to potentially work on a game for the console. By this point, TT were pretty much over the 16-Bit era and were keen to move onto the new Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, and so they declined… until they were notified that they were being asked to work on a “Sonic The Hedgehog” game, which quickly made them change their minds! This gane would go on to become “Sonic 3D: Flickies Island/Sonic 3D Blast”.

Around the same time on the other side of the planet, Kats Sato left his role at SEGA Japan as a designer sometime after the “Clockwork Knight: Pepperouchau no Fukubukuro” was completed, and moved to SEGA Europe in London, United Kingdom as a Producer, where in a strange twist of fate, the first game he was tasked to produce was… “Sonic 3D”!
Of course, this would mean Kats Sato and Jon Burton would soon meet, and as you can read below in an excerpt from SSMUK, a funny story would take place.

Jon Burton would go on to add the following in “Retro Gamer №76 (2016.09.07)”[11]…

Interestingly, it was Mickey Mania that made them talk to us.

The Producer, Kats Sato, was also the producer of Clockwork Knight,
the game on the Saturn that we took the concept of to make Toy Story.

And with Clockwork Knight, he saw Mickey Mania and had taken some of
the puzzle ideas and put them in there. So, we sort of 
fed each other from different sides of the planet.
So, obviously we were on the same wavelength.

Jon Burton would go on to add the following in an October 2017 NintenCity.com interview[12]…

We made Mickey Mania on the Genesis and Kats Sato (who was a producer
for Sega) saw it and loved it.

He admitted to me he ‘stole’ ideas from it for Clockwork Knight,
and he sought us out when they needed someone for a 16-bit Sonic.

This seems to have been said in a joking way of course, and the two seemed to have grown close, with Kats Sato remarking in a March 2020 Terredejeux.net interview[13]…

Before finishing the project of Sonic 3D, SEGA thought it would worth to keep
Traveller’s Tales for the next Sonic project. So, the idea of Sonic R came 
quickly and decided to have a project with Travellers’ Tales continuously.

John got married during this project and I personally had a good relationship
with him enough to be invited to the wedding. 

It’s been interesting to see just how connected Clockwork Knight has been to other games!

Segagaga (SGGG) is a… strange game. It is an RPG that was released on the Dreamcast just as SEGA announced that they would leave the console market. The game is a bit of a swan song for the console and the company itself.

The game is absolutely littered with content and even the most obscure references from SEGA’s history, Featured in this video are all of the animated cutscenes featuring Tongara from Clockwork Knight.

I have never played this game myself (as it’s not really my kind of game, sadly), so I do not know if Clockwork Knight is referenced anywhere else in the game. What I am sure of, is that as far as animated Cutscenes go, this is everything featuring the golden Knight~

Clockwork Knight is very briefly shown on a book/magazine (not sure which) being held by a character in the final episode (Episode 12) of the 2016 anime series “Phantasy Star Online 2: The Animation”.

I have no idea if there are any more references to Clockwork Knight in this show as it’s not really my kind of anime, but from what I do know, the show in general is littered with SEGA references, which makes sense with it being a SEGA IP.