strict October 1996 deadline, Wallis isolated Coffin's team, preventing outside influence. The team comprised four artists, two programmers, a contractor, and three designers, set up in an old STI location. They worked between sixteen and twenty hours a day. Although neither Senn nor Alon were officially part of the production after the visit, they continued working on their version, hoping to pitch it to Sega as a PC game. In April, Sega executive vice president Bernie Stolar approached STI and asked what he could do to help the game meet its deadline. At Wallis' suggestion, he provided the tools and source code for Sonic Team's 3D Saturn game Nights into Dreams. Two weeks later, Stolar requested that the team stop using the engine, as Naka had reportedly threatened to leave Sega if it were used. Senn dismissed this as speculation, but said that, if true, he understood Naka's interest in maintaining control over the Sonic Team technology and the Sonic franchise. Sonic Team was developing its own 3D Sonic game using the Nights engine, which could have motivated Naka's threat. The loss of the Nights engine cost the Sonic X-treme team weeks of development. In July 2022, Naka denied that he had anything to do with X-treme use of the Nights engine and said it would have been useless because Nights was coded in assembly and X-treme was in C. He suggested that the developers invented the story to rationalize their failure to finish X-treme. Cancellation In May 1996, Sega displayed a playable demo of X-treme at E3 in Los Angeles, and displayed a version of Coffin's engine. At this time, team morale had dropped and turnover was high. By August, Coffin had contracted severe walking pneumonia. Wallis praised Coffin's effort, but acknowledged that without Coffin the team had no chance of meeting its deadline. Around the same time, Senn became so ill that he was told he had six months to live, though he survived. With both teams crippled two months before the deadline, Wallis canceled the game. Sega initially stated that X-treme had been delayed, but in early 1997 announced that it had been canceled. For the 1996 holiday season, Sega instead concentrated on Sonic Team's Nights into Dreams and a port of the Genesis game Sonic 3D Blast by Traveller's Tales, to which Wallis contributed. Morawiec requested that X-treme be reworked into bonus stages in 3D Blast,