Apparently Tom Payne went to a vintage game store in California and dropped off a fuckton of Sonic 2 development floppies? EDIT: Pending a proper writeup, here is a twitter thread from the Video Game History Foundation account. https://info.sonicretro.org/Category:Tom Payne disk sprites
w...wait a minute? This should be bigger news. I see metropolis written on one of those. Why is this not bigger news?!
I imagine those are the same disks ICEKnight unearthed back in the day. Bit annoying - if he was keen to part with them someone could have jumped in and got these things preserved properly. Now it's all up in the air.
That instagram post says "Wednesday @nkdbob @jesterpezz and Frank Cifildi will be coming to the store to get these preserved." I think we're going to be OK.
Yeah fucking huge news if I'm being honest. Even if there's only a small chance these will have anything new. Sonic 2 is what Retro was built upon. Deserves a new thread, but maybe when the contents of the disks are (hopefully) made available?
The B-Bomb stuff might be of great interest too, seeing as he created graphics for what-could-have-been Cyber City Zone and what-would-become The Machine for that game
https://twitter.com/TheN4Us/status/1117863819185774601 https://twitter.com/cupofn00bles/status/1118527168810639360 am I super late to the party about this or something? randomly came across it this evening, figured Retro would have SOME kind of chatter about it, but didn't seem to find anything... Petaluma was a 10 minute drive from where I was for the last four months, I had actually meant to check out that store while I was out there but never got around to it. are "nkdbob" "jesterpezz" and "Frank Cifildi" any part of whatever's left of the sonic research community? I'm so out of touch with all this shit lol
We had a brief discussion about it here when Neo alerted everyone about it. Obviously the Sonic 2 stuff could be of the greatest potential magnitude amidst the other games - though the reason we (and I) held off in making a thread is because we wanted to wait for everything to be released to have a proper discussion about it. That said it is awesome you made a thread as in hindsight it probably deserves discussion as the situation progresses and unfolds - and as hopefully the stuff is released and revealed.
lol i just miss the days of Mad Hype (™) over prospective new shit being released like back in the day :P Stumbling on that twitter post was like a 15 year flashback I know I had seen pictures of one disk and chatter about it a few years ago; http://www.retrocollect.com/Articles/uncovering-sonic-2s-secrets-finding-the-hidden-palace-part-4.html but forgot (or never knew) whether they landed in the hands of anybody competent enough to actually preserve/respect/dissect them. Seeing "bubbler" written on the disk stood out 'cause i remembered that was one of the lost enemies or something like that, back at a time when so much stuff was still being uncovered. I'd just be happy to see what, if anything, comes from it. I'm also curious as to just why Tom Payne traded all that stuff in to the store in the first place... it's not exactly "normal old game stuff" that was sitting around in the basement, even if that's exactly what it was doing at his house :P
It's in good hands, so don't worry about the contents not being preserved/released or anything. EDIT: Images got leaked out of the blue, here's a mirror so that wou guys won't get intrusive ads while browsing them: Sonic 1 yamaguchi Sonic 2 sonic_enemies_backup metropolis bob Spinny & Spike pc_disk_again B-Bomb b-bomb_asteroid_enemy_b b-bomb_plutonia_lower_class b-bomb_plutonia_upper_class b-bomb_plutonian_enemies b-bomb_tech_world_blocks Misc Sonic 2 and B-Bomb tom_payne_dpaint Scans Sonic 2 development documents (1/2) Sonic 2 development documents (2/2) Credit goes to Frank Cifaldi, Rich Whitehouse and the Video Game History Foundation.
Yeah I was tempted to split those posts out into a separate thread but figured it'd happen anyway when the contents were dumped. No matter, this one's fine now: I've moved the posts in here.
Oh, that guy released Frank's stuff as-is before he could finish documenting everything in the full-fledged article that he was preparing. How nice.
Frank tweeted about it: "Man I wish you would have talked to us about this before publishing, we're still in the middle of reverse engineering the rest of the files etc., we only just archived these two days ago. Kinda jumped the gun on the reveal IMO. I have a lot of theories about what these files are that I wanted to confirm with Tom, that's what we were working on. As it is right now it's just a mess of content with no context. Please at least credit @DickWhitehouse with reverse-engineering the Sega Digitizer format." Seems like a really shitty situation all around.
Do you want me to remove the link to Frank's reply so it doesn't bring more attention to the original tweet?
Big oof. He must have really wanted to have that exclusive. Really should have considered his greed probably just ruined whatever relations he had with Frank and his org now. I wonder if there were no explicit rules given so he just saw it as a free for all? I hope this doesn't ruin whatever Frank was planning since I'll take carefully done research over a rushed "EXCLUSIVE" blog post any day.