Sonic 2 Original Music Allocations

Because Masa was composing based on the environments and visuals of the level, and why the hell would Arabs be the first thing on his mind when seeing an oil refinery dumping oil in a lake? The first thing that comes to MY mind would be...pollution by a big oil company. Because it was the early 90s and environmentalism was huge. Frankly I think if you see an oil refinery dumping oil in the ocean, and your first thought is how much oil is imported from Saudi Arabia, that's not only a weirdly political/economical angle from a composing standpoint, but also kinda...racist? Even if Kuwait was the site of one of the biggest oil spills at the time, it was caused by the U.S., not the Arabs. It's a fucked up connection to make for Sonic of all things. No kid in 1992 would ever make that kind of connection. Kids don't know what the fucking OPEC is, but they do know what Captain Planet and all those other environmental messages in media are.

And yeah, Masa was a wealthy celebrity musician, and that's precisely why I can't see him being so politically aware and so politically-minded that he'd insert that kind of thinking into his work. That isn't the kind of music he makes, nor did he take that approach with any other song in the game.

Why can't you just accept that the Shifting Sand Land/Sandopolis-ass level theme was meant for a desert level with pyramids, one of THE most basic tropes for any platformer and one which we know existed? I can accept that it moving to Oil Ocean makes it more interesting and it's a happy accident, but use some common sense and basic logic.

 

At the time of S2, the western desert level existed, monument valley instead of pyramids. Unless I missed something?

 

Which was created later by Brenda Cook and was not part of the original concepts sent to Masa, which based on the maps, was a stereotypical middle eastern desert.

 

As such, the music that was composed fits better for the desert concept than a typical oil refinery. Still don't understand the swap, but eh

 

Do we have any proof of these original concepts sent to Masa? And I don't see the same thing on the maps. I see a sandy land labeled "Sand Shower zone". And unrelated to it, a pyramid labeled "Warp point", that come after Metropolis. This same pyramid on ancient times is in the middle of what looks like a tropical forest. As far as we know, it may also be a Maya pyramid.

 

Besides, a desert is still a desert, and combining tropes from across the globe isn't that uncommon in fantasy video games. Hell, Sonic Frontiers had a desert location with North American visuals and Middle Eastern music!

 

Yes, absolutely. I was just pointing out in my last couple of posts that we have to be careful with speculation based on prototype material. The existence of an oriental desert in S2 at one point in time is not proven whatsoever. What is fact however, is a western desert, and oriental music. One got scrapped, the other was finally assigned to OOZ.

 

EDIT: The original post was poorly worded so I've reworked it.

Every time Blue Lake is put between Tropical Plant and Hill Top in "internal order", I post this:


Which shows an arrow pointing directly from Tropical Plant Zone to Hill Top Zone, and wonder why anyone thinks the place on the literal opposite side of the island was planned to go in between them. The later timeline does show that order, but the level IDs were clearly made at around the time of the maps - if they were made based on the timeline, then where did the extra zone between Hill Top and Rock come from, and why are Death Egg, Hill Top 2, and Blue skipped before Casino? Try this one:



Anything using level IDs for original music should assume that Tropical Plant/Sun was intended to be in slot $06, because it's the zone that immediately precedes Hill Top in the order when the level slots were assigned.

 

Actually I'd personally say EHZ = 2P Results and OWZ = EHZ music works too.

The former track has a calm and beach-like feel, which would go with a starting tropical zone. For comparison the starting zone in Sonic 1 has sections with a calm vibe, unlike the final Emerald Hill music.

The latter has a more energetic and cheery feel, fitting the concept art of OWZ, which suggests a more speedy and frenetic tropical level:

 

I also have screenshots somewhere (maybe in the old GCZ post) that has almost 1:1 tiles of Wing Fortress that match the concept art for Death Egg. Ill post them if I can find them.

EDIT: Sorry for the crudeness, but the tiles from WFZ are on the right.


EDIT2:

Also, since there's some obvious heavy influence from Star Wars (including the music for WFZ). I'll leave this. A shot from the model of the Death star, and then some tiles from Wing Fortress.

 

2P Results is a bit too shot to be level music IMO

 

I thoroughly appreciate any effort to dissect this mystery that has bugged me for decades.

Why IS the level music in a completely different order in the finalized Sonic 2 sound driver? Those songs don't have to be in any particular order. So why are they in *that* order? I believe the only person who could possibly answer that is the man who took Masa's songs and put them into the game. He was very likely the maintainer of that song list.

I don't believe in the idea that the list is based on the intended level order or assignments. There's enough there that just doesn't line up well. And yes, that's based on listening and judging what sounds right and what doesn't, because how else do you research something that has no other fallback?

My theory has been, for at least a couple years now, one that basically states as levels were being worked on, music intended for those levels was converted over and inserted into the game. The music priority was based on which levels were being worked, and when. And what are the first screenshots (which includes mockups) ever released showing off Sonic 2? Emerald Hill, Hidden Palace, and Sand Shower. And what are songs 02, 03, and 04? Emerald Hill, Hidden Palace, and Sand Shower (as far as we know, and there's plenty of evidence there to support that). Then 05 is Meteopolis, which we know was started shortly after those other three. And I could go on from there, and I've written about all of this multiple times now on these forums, and you can find those posts. But to me, just looking at those first songs alone -- 02, 03, 04, 05 -- makes a very convincing case. It does get a little more difficult to explain some of the ones further down the line, but I would answer to those by suggesting the sound programmer doesn't have to twiddle his thumbs, waiting for more levels to be started; he can start on another random song as he gets freed up. And those level songs would end up being listed in the game in the order they were added. Think song 10, the last in the list, which wasn't even present in the Simon Wai ROM.

But again, nobody will truly have the answer unless the man behind the list is asked about it.

 

Too short? I just checked and it starts looping at around 0:42 like most level songs. Contrast with the options/level select music whose first loop is only 6 seconds long.

 

2P Results was a file select/save theme. Totoya did say that it was necessary for the full list of levels, and it comes right after the title screen in the sound test.

 

This video is very relevant to this thread.

 

I really think that you are right on this too. To me, this makes a lot more sense development wise. Why bother having the songs sorted in the level order, when you have even a correspondence table coded into the game? The songs were just put into the game in the order they were worked on, which happens to be close to the level order at first. The last one being the last song worked on, which is the new HPZ unused music.

You have the same things with objects implementation. The objects were put into the game in the order they were worked on. You can see that the objects implementation follows a pattern. Generally speaking, objects that belongs to a level are somewhat grouped and have close IDs. Even in the compiled ROM, the implementations are somewhat grouped. The first levels being worked on (EHZ, HPZ...) have a lot of objects IDs below $20. Their implementation are in the first half of the ROM. The last levels being worked on (I believe WFZ and the rework of CNZ) have objects IDs above $A0. Their implementation are more in the second half of the ROM. The final boss is ID $C7 which happens to be the last object besides the Crawl badnik of CNZ (ID $C8), and all of the ending and cutscenes objects.

Something interesting to note too to prove this theory, is the LoadSubObject function. It is only implemented for objects IDs above $8C. It looks like they improved the engine, created this function somewhere during implementation of object $8C, and didn't bother to retrofit all other objects below this ID to use the new function (regression risk maybe). In the compiled ROM, the LoadSubObject function is shoehorned between implementation of object $59 and implementation of object $8C. All objects past the LoadSubObject implementation have IDs above $8C. They really put the implementation in the ROM on the fly as they were working on things. And this makes a lot of sense to me.

EDIT: Ho, I forget something. To be a bit back on topic, I wrote above that the new HPZ music is unused. This is untrue as it is used in the final game for HPZ (the level got scrapped, not the music). A thing I always hated in the S2 remaster is that the HPZ music is back to the 2P MCZ theme. "It is like that in the prototypes and it fits better" they said. Well, in that case, why is OOZ theme still the oriental music, and not back to the 2P CNZ theme if the later fits better too?

 

The credits list 8 people who worked on Sonic 2's sound. The only one credited as "Sound Programmer" is Tomoyuki Shimada, who at the time worked for Game Arts Co., Ltd. He doesn't seem to have any online presence, though. I found many people under that name, but none of them seemed to be old enough nor have the right skillset. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that he was in charge of the nitty gritty technical side of the sound, as the rest of his credits don't really track with that, though I could be wrong.

Then there's Jimita, who was personally responsible for converting Masa's demos for Sonic 1. He's credited as a "Sound Assistant", though according to his website, his work on Sonic 2 wasn't even worthy of a footnote in his career, so it's likely his work, along with Macky's, was only stuff reused from the first game.

That leaves Yoshiaki Kashima, Masaru Setsumaru, Masayuki Nagao, Sachio Ogawa, and Izuho Takeuchi. Of them, Kashima and Setsumaru are the most likely candidates. They created the sound driver used by other Sonic games, so they were probably very familiar with the driver for Sonic 2 as well. However, asking them about their work on a 33-year-old game would be a challenge.

Setsumaru is on Facebook, and reasonably active. If we tread carefully, we could reach out and ask him about this stuff. I don't want to ask him myself, as I don't want people jumping down my throat for being out of line and going too far bothering these people. Plus, I don't know enough about the technical shit to be comfortable with that. Also, Setsumaru still works at Sega, so it's a good chance he's tight-lipped about that information.

 

I'll point out that the 2P MCZ theme being used in the remake was strictly a Stealth thing. I believe he fought tooth and nail for that even though no one else wanted it. It's a very him thing to do.

 

It's worth noting that the song order is different between the Simon Wai prototype and later builds (the order then is Casino Night 2P/Oil Ocean, Emerald/Green Hill, Wood/Metropolis...) See also this post.