Sure, nothing can be called officially canon until established in official material or confirmed by official word. I guess my point was, SA2 is a game known for leaving a lot of backstory details out, or hinting at them without being explicit. Gerald's connection with Angel Island lore wasn't explained until Sonic Battle, Maria's disease was only revealed in official material, and it's known that a number of plot details and cutscenes were cut from the game due to time constraints, some of which made their way to Sonic X. I wouldn't put the Shadow<>Super Sonic connection in a wiki article, but I wouldn't be quick to dismiss the possibility either. SA2 made somewhat of a big deal out of Shadow's likeness to Sonic but never explained it, hinting that there's some untold reason they look alike; and Shadow's out of place line during the final boss joking about how Super Sonic might be the real ultimate life may even be a possible nod to the connection.
It was always a nice theory and there's certainly a lot of runway pointing in that direction, but sadly it's a runway that leads to a dead-end without any real word of god. I mean, If we want something really silly, I had a similar idea when playing Sonic R. SO. Regal Ruin seems to some ancient civilization, and there's some Echidna statues around, right? and the next main game that follows Sonic R is Sonic Adventure. So I'm thinking maybe there's some kinda connection. Regal Ruins - Mystic Ruins. Both Ancient Echidna Ruins.... Different place/Same place but different design? That part's not so important. I then had this amazing lightbulb headcanon where during the World Grand Prix, Eggman somehow found out more about the Echidna's history at Regal Ruin, which led him to find out about Chaos. Therefore kicking off the chain of events leading to Sonic Adventure, THEREFORE giving Sonic R more of a reason to exist in the grand tale of- Okay I'm done now. (still keeping it in my personal 'silly headcanon' folder though.)
Just a little something else I want to draw attention to that I don't think there are any sort of documentation for, are the executable(/readme) files packaged with the PC edition of Sonic CD. I distinctly remember there being two (or possibly just the one) which had not only its own expository story for Sonic CD, but a sort of synopsis of many other -- if not all -- Sonic games published up to that point. I'm sure of their existence because the exceedingly cheesy line "gotta slide, Clyde," uttered by Sonic, that I have seen absolutely nowhere else. (Surely something so horrendous would've become a ubiquitous meme were it not so obscure.) Moreover, this was for years the only information I had for "Nack the Weasel," Espio the Chameleon, etc., and the context in which they played their roles. ("Nack" was present in Sonic the Screen Saver art, but I had no way of making that connection) Finally, there was a higher resolution (read: not blown up) image of Sonic's 1&CD running frames laid out in sequence that I know for sure exists because I used it as a forum avatar several years ago on some other site. I don't have the disk with me, nor the wherewithal to best document it even if I did. But I thought it would be sensible to bring it your attention in case you do. It might also be a good idea to check if there are some equivalent .exes on the Japanese version.
Here's the help file (requires a separate download to read in Win10) and the OMAKE folder, which contains several high quality artworks (they were originally BMP, I've compressed them to PNG).
If we're talking about really bad lines, I think "contempt of Hedgehog" beats out "Gotta slide, Clyde"!
I always liked how the plot of Sonic Chaos, by following the logic that South Island has no fixed location, implies the original six Chaos Emeralds are a set unique to it with a similar role to the Master Emerald. A while before Sonic 3 got released, in fact. How much thought they were putting on overall lore logic is anyone's guess, of course.
The name "South Island" is interesting, given that it has no fixed location. That being said, didn't an early manual or ancillary material imply that South Island floats around in a ring-shaped circuit, or am I making that up entirely? Either way, I assume that it's a mobile island that generally sticks to the southern regions of the planet. Is the same true of Westside Island, or is that a fixed island? Really, I just like to headcanon that the random strange environments in Sonic's world are forever twisting and warping and changing shape due to the reality-warping properties emitted by the Rings and Chaos Emeralds.
Thanks, MainMemory! Anyways, yeah, it's so hard to find these PC-centric things online I start thinking that somehow no-one else knows about them... or I'm just that inept at looking for them. The Sonic & Knuckles Collection OMAKE is available here and there, although I'm not sure in its original resolution. Otherwise it seems the older stuff might be more prone to fall through the cracks. For instance there was this weird Hewlett-Packard desktop wallpaper with Sonic Adventure era stock art that inexplicably appeared in my computer. I'm certain it was official and really wish I could find it again so I can share it. I'm sure I uploaded it to Photobucket, but I'm paying their ludicrous fees, however.
One of my former collegues was denied purchase of a home cutlery set from Wilko, because he didn't have any ID on him at the time. He was 30 years old. This is the second best Wilko-related story I can now tell.
Scan of the logo-less cover from Gamefan (June 1999) drawn by Patrick Spaziante, picturing Sonic Adventure :
https://twitter.com/Yasuharah/status/1091563511061241862 oh?? (tried image tags but the board wouldn't let me) Edit: FFFFFfffff there is a topic on this that I didn't know about because I had no idea what this was referring to
Are there any pre-Sonic character concepts that aren't on the Wiki? I thought there were some more color ones, but it could just be my memory failing me.
There's a little bit about the creation of Amy Rose in Famitsu's Sonic 25th anniversary roundtable interview. https://www.famitsu.com/news/201606/24107383.html?page=2 Would anyone be able to translate this? From Google Translate, it seems like it says the head of the licensing department requested a "Minnie Mouse" style character for Sonic. Or was Ohshima himself involved with the licensing side?