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

You’re right! I shouldn’t have implied that as an original plan. So the spike pit was just a mistake…even worse

 

this made me laugh LMAO

hey wait isn't this the Tornado 2 from SA1?

ah heck you've all said it. mods pls delete so this is not just more clutter.

 

I wonder if they decided to make a levels with sharing assets only later in development, when they got that they don't want to spend much money on 2-4mb schemes or they don't have a time. Anyway they made a Genocide City concept art along with Metropolis, so, who knows.
Also, I forgot; do Tails has his flying sprites in Simon Wai prototype or not yet? I remember as yes, but I'm not sure 100%, and I can't check it now.

 

Yo, remember when we were talking about MMZ as early MCZ? One of arguments why MCZ can't be Dust Hill was a "It doesn't looks like a EHZ".
Well....
Have anybody of you thought that EHZ art looks too blocky for green hill-esque art?
What if i'll say you, that it looks like...

Yeah, Ik that it looks very rough, but you've got my idea, right?

 

What is interesting is that based on GoldS's list of which artist did what Zone, Ishiwatari was in charge of both Mystic Cave and Emerald Hill. It might potentially explain the art direction Ishiwatari went with Emerald Hill in this case? I was initially dismissive knowing different artists did different Zones, but knowing that artist handled both, perhaps Emerald Hill was designed with this knowledge in mind. I always viewed it as an evolution of the kinda boxy/checkered design Green Hill from Sonic 1 had, but it might have been an intentional design choice to allow clever tile re-usage. Perhaps after the Zone count was trimmed, the need for tile re-usage died down a bit, allowing Ishiwatari to just kinda go ham with whatever she wanted for that Zone slot? It would explain the pretty drastic difference in the concept art produced and what we got.

We also know Cyber City and Metropolis were meant to be sister levels and Tom did the art for both of those, with intentional asset re-usage. I think it lends credibility to the idea.

I guess the reason I'm on board with the idea that Mystic Cave came from Madness Mountain is due to Naka's quote implying the track it ended up with was intended for a 'haunted house-esque' area and Madness Mountain seems to be the only thing we have that sorta seems to fit the bill for an interior-centric Zone that would make sense with that track. It seems very weird a track was never produced for something that would fit Mystic Cave if something was sent off to Naka that resembled that, otherwise I don't see why it was never placed into the game. It seems like the idea changed, but thankfully the 'spooky-feel' fit the new Zone idea well enough that they didn't have to do any last minute track switching like what occurred with Oil Ocean and the desert level.

 

I believe that Yamaguchi actually brings up the creation of Emerald Hill's "chocolate" terrain in the interview. That might be useful here.

 

Speaking of counterpart levels being done by the same artist, Craig was in charge of both Hidden Palace and Oil Ocean, which are listed as sharing enemies in Tom's development materials. The map concept art also shows Olympus in the same location as Oil Ocean in the past and ruined present respectively...

It seems like they were counterparts, at least at one point in development.

 

Kind of makes sense considering Olympus was originally a structure on top of water, making the connection to Ocean Wind and Oil Ocean easier to accept.

It also enforces the theory that HPZ was underground and cave-like due to miscommunication.

Incidentally, the unintended cave theme might be the reason behind the name change. Since Olympus was supposed to be a special place tied to time travel and/or the Chaos Emeralds, they didn't want the final implementation to be a generic cave level. So they opted to reinterpret Craig's cave graphics as depicting an underground palace.

Craig even said that he never heard the name "Hidden Palace" when he drew its graphics, and that it might have come later.

 

It's also worth mentioning that Oil Ocean and Hidden Palace both have streams of liquid that Sonic is supposed to slide on. HPZ's diagonal shafts also seem like perfect spots for elevators, so the level gimmicks also line up.

 

I had a similar thought too about this! Very interesting both levels shared the slide gimmick and no other level did. How close are they palette-wise too? They seem to share very similar shades of purple which feels intentional if there was a link that existed at some point.

I did also point out this weird object in Oil Ocean that seems to have no immediately clear purpose a while back (though some other users suggested some things it might be). It might be a stretch of a connection, but it would be interesting if Craig did intend for the little spinny things to be harvested Emeralds from a ruined Hidden Palace and that's a bit of world building that got lost during development. I kinda wonder if he remembers anything about being asked to try to make some more clear connections between the stuff he worked on.

 

I assume that you got Tom mixed up with Craig.

Craig has said that Oil Ocean was inspired by a generic oil refinery as well as the Golden Gate Bridge, so looking at either could give us the answer.

 

You're correct in that I mixed the two artist up last night. My bad! I'll edit the post to correct that.

I also wonder if the earlier background we never got to see made the tie-in more obvious, but palette comparisons I still think are pretty interesting to look into. There are a couple of shades that are shared between the Zones, though others aren't exact. Oil Ocean's is on the left, with Hidden Palace being on the right:



(Credit to Techokami and WizToad for these so I didn't have to open a Sonic 2 editor to grab them.)

I think another thing that's worth highlighting are the glowing lights in Hidden Palace kinda feel similar as a decoration to the spinny things in Oil Ocean:

Spoiler

I've looked at a couple of images of an oil refinery but can't really find anything the spinny things could plausibly be. Perhaps some sort light fixture akin to the red orbs?

 

The spinning things always seemed like a stylistic choice if anything

 

I don't think every single graphic Craig came up with had some sort of lore purpose. Maybe he just thought it looked cool.

 

In the past (early 2000s, iirc), I remember all the times people asked him about the "Master Emerald" in Hidden Palace Zone, and if Tails had anything to do with that. LOL

 

I was always really embarrassed by that. I never understood how that idea gained any following. Granted, everyone had some ideas that in retrospect were silly (and I had my share of them), but *that* one took the cake.

 

It was a large, green jewel in a zone which shares the same name as the Sonic & Knuckles zone that contains the Master Emerald. And this zone also had a 1-up monitor which had Tails' face on it even if you were playing as Sonic.

Considering how little we knew at the time, it wasn't that big of a stretch.

 

That emerald obstacle has to be the biggest red herring in Sonic history.

I recall people taking it for granted that it was supposed to be the Master Emerald. Funny how the two Hidden Palace incarnations having a single large emerald turned out to be just a coincidence.

 

I'm not sure if this idea has been brought up before, because I think that it would be pretty crucial to our cause;

We now have early level maps for both Metropolis and Genocide City, both seemingly from the exact same time period. Not only that, but we have prototypes of Sonic 2 where those exact same Metropolis maps are fully playable. Metropolis' acts obviously went through numerous redesigns, but it seems very likely that those early Genocide City maps were the only ones ever created.

Can't we use this knowledge to roughly determine when exactly GCZ/CCZ was cut?

 

so metropolis zone is one of the """later""" zones in that it's not in the Nick Arcade proto at all like Chemical Plant, Hill Top etc, and its inclusion in Simon Wai has the rhombus mechanics that show up in the GCZ/CCZ maps (IIRC, this is a long thread).

So either they added metropolis as-is with the intention of changing it later, or what we see in the simon wai proto is what was 100% intended before GCZ/CCZ got officially cut, and that zone was cut after the proto was made.