New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

To add to this, it's worth noting that Yasuhara's concept art for Genocide/Cyber City already calls itself Cyber City, yet even by the Wai build it still calls itself Genocide City. For all we know, they could've already come up with the name Mystic Cave by that time, but for convenience they just kept calling it Dust Hill because that's what it may have directly evolved from. As you say though, none of us are God. Would be cool if we had a chronoscope, however. :P

Also, I suspect that Neo Green Hill's implementation was quite fresh as of Wai, it's the first level there, and this was meant as a public demo. They'd already shown some of the other zones, why not showcase something that hadn't been seen before to keep the momentum of public excitement going?

And lastly, some of this (clearly western produced) promotional material is interesting. This image clearly depicts Oil Ocean. But then... hold on a minute, are these depicting Wood and Blue Ocean?

 

Truthfully I had always presumed, having seen those two images in a Sonic 3 tips book first, that they were tied to Sonic 3. In retrospect I should have considered they were older, as there was also an image of Sonic posed like ol' Uncle Sam with the badniks spreading out around him. But hey, if you're gonna reuse old concept art, may as well reuse the promotional art based on it!

 

I definitely recall seeing those promo images (illustrated by Duncan Gutteridge) before Sonic 3 came out, as they were used for both a 1993 calendar and several Sonic books.

Speaking of which, there was also this one in a city of sorts..

 

They just took "Cyber CITY" too literally

 

Or it looks like Chemical Plant background, above water.

 

Just speculation*, but something occurred to me. "Emerald Isle"... an "isle" is a small island. I'd say that this could potentially be considered an isle.

*(I'm on the same boat as Saxman when it comes to "we can't truly know anything without concrete evidence")

 

Huh. That badnik is Shellcracker. If it was intended for Blue Ocean rather than Metropolis, I wouldn't be surprised.

Doesn't every zone have a maximum of two badniks, though? How many zones have more than that? I wonder if we can take all the badniks we have and potentially tie them to the "correct" zones.

 

EHZ- 3 badniks (Snail/Coconuts, Bomber, Chopper)
HTZ- 3 badniks (dinosaur, ball with fire, ball with spike)
MTZ- 3 badniks (Starman, sliser mantis, crab)
SCZ- 3 badniks (turtle, balkiry, that thing that shit on you the spike balls)

CNZ has only one badnik, lol, as well as WFZ, and DEZ has noone

 

WFZ has one: Clucker. CPZ has two: Grabber and Spiny.

 

It's not a Shellcracker, as Gutteridge drew a perfectly on-model one for this piece of artwork:



I've actually known about this 1993 calendar artwork for a while, and even considered bringing it up here on this thread. However, this artwork is full of oddities, such as that strange crab badnik, a brown Clucker moving on the ground with his turret, a photorealistic parrot, Sonic swimming and Eggman flying his Sonic 1 wrecking ball mobile in this piece:



It seems that Gutteridge had little to none knowledge about the game he was basing these images off of, and I'm therefore inclined to believe that any resemblance to Sonic 2 beta material is purely coincidental.

 

Nah, he must've been given some reference material or at least descriptions of varying levels of elaboration. That one image you posted I believe is supposed to represent Green Hill. It's literally a green hill! With flowers and trees to boot.

It's blatantly obvious he didn't fully understand this stuff, but he was commissioned and had a job to do within certain given parameters, and he conformed to those parameters.

 

I can't see that being the case.

First of all, notice how the only Badniks seen in these images are the ones that made it into the final game? (Aside from that weird crab which looks nothing like the other ones, and is therefore probably an original creation) If he was given concept material as reference, then why didn't he draw any of the enemies seen in Tom Payne's concept art? And furthermore, why are so many of the Badniks you see in that "Green Hill" image behaving incorrectly? (The Clucker driving its turret like a tank, the Buzzer flying forwards with its stinger down, the Rexon and the Flasher crawling on the ground) This suggests that he neither had access to at least enemy concept art and had not seen much of the final game.

Second, why does the Oil Ocean piece's background reflect the final one? If he was given development material, surely we'd see something completely different, as Craig Stitt's original background reportedly looked a lot different from the final one.

Third, Gutteridge's artwork often featured Sonic and the gang in absurd situations and locations. Sure, I'd like to believe that those two pieces are based on Wood Zone and Blue Ocean Zone, but by that logic he could've also drawn artwork about a scrapped F1 zone



a soccer minigame



or a cutscene where a tiny Sonic hatches out of Robotnik's easter egg.



And finally, the most damning piece of evidence against this theory, Duncan Gutteridge worked exclusively with SEGA of Europe. That's obviously not where the game was developed, so I can't see why they would've had any concept art to easily hand to him. That's why you don't see much beta influences in Japanese Sonic 2 promotional material either.

 

A crab and starfish would make sense for an ocean. Then again, there's a pig in Scrap Brain.

 

It looks more like Aquatic Ruin, than Wood Zone. The spears.

 

Ok, I remember this image! I don't have any earth shattering info to drop about it but I wanna say I recally it was used in a K-Mart catalog around that time, or maybe even posted up inside the store itself in the electronics section. Sonic Spinball was out and being advertised around the time I last saw it. As a matter of fact, I distinctly remember naively assuming that Spinball was what it was advertising; this was about a year before I ever played much less owned the game and so I assumed Tails played a bigger role in the game than he did and that was in reference to something from it.

Also holy guacamole Sonic's right arm! Flexible little fella, isn't he?

 

I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Anyone else notice that most of Mystic Cave's gimmicks seem... borrowed from other zones?

The vines are identical to the hooks from WFZ, same with the wooden crates being pretty much just reskins of the CNZ boxes. We already know that the spiked stairs and spike balls on chains were taken from GCZ. The swinging platforms are pretty similar to the ones from ARZ and I suspect that the drawbridges are also related to the hatches from GCZ.

 

I feel the vine/hook connection could be contributed to Wing Fortress being a much later addition in development. I feel it's probable they wanted something that made going from the bottom of the airship to the top a bit easier (while also switching the 'layer' Sonic stands on) and the gimmick fit the bill.

It might also be possible that the CNZ boxes were originally designed for Mystic Cave first? Knowing CNZ was reworked visually later in development due to the visuals not representing a casino very well, I could see the level design also being reworked in certain areas. Casino Night is pretty 'light' on hazards that can harm/kill Sonic honestly - I genuinely forgot they were even there at all and I feel the pinball tables overshadow most of the other gimmicks/hazards found there. Nik Pi pointed it out earlier, but Casino Night also only has one Badnik too. The only other Zone that only has one Badnik is Wing Fortress, but the Zone makes up for that by having a pretty big bottomless pit right below it.

The other gimmicks being borrowed are really odd though. Maybe you can argue the ARZ platform reusage might stem from the heavy vegetation in both? Assuming Cyber City was already cut by/around the time they began designing Mystic Cave, perhaps the other gimmicks were just donated to it. It's still really weird to think about regardless and just makes the level's inclusion feel more odd in the grand scheme of things.

Writing this did also make me realize Sonic 1 and CD both featured spinning spikeballs in their final 'regular' levels. Funny how things getting shuffled around in Sonic 2 led to that game breaking the trend!

 

The early versions of CNZ with the old graphics already have the spots for the boxes, so this couldn't have been the case.

Also, weirdly enough the hooks in WFZ don't really take you anywhere useful, mainly to just dead ends with no collectibles.

 

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but Kit & Krysta (formerly of Nintendo Minute fame) did a video where they visited the building where Sonic 2 was developed. They even left a little figurine to commemorate it as a historical site lol.



Kinda sad to see the building mostly abandoned...

 

They look like that Soyjak meme