Sonic 2 Development Lore

Interesting thought, but according to the timeline document, the zone order in the ruined present goes Rock World > Oil Ocean > Dust Hill > Death Egg. Rock World is right next to the pyramid.


If there is anything in the documents linking Olympus to HPZ, then I've missed it.

 

Huh, I could swear that there was a version where Oil Ocean was the last one. Guess not.

This document from Tom Payne that I shared a few replies ago. Oil Ocean is labeled as a counterpart to Secret Palace.

 

Future of Olympus it's a Ocean Wind.
I'm not sure that you can time warping from there.

Also I'm not sure that all these discussions are matter, cuz conceptions were changing every five minutes during the development, and it's possible that in different time both versions of hpz place were real

 

Okay, that's interesting. That adds some credibility to that theory. Although that document could be merely referring to zones that were planned to share assets?

I was under the impression that the western devs weren't even aware of the planned time travel plot? They never mentioned it in interviews, and all references to time travel seem to come from Japanese design documents.

 

Just imagine if Oil Ocean were reusing HPZ graphics, like HTZ or RWZ do.....
Lol
Also, this table of badniks is pretty weird.. no information about what and where should go. Just a mess of HPZ EHZ and CPZ enemies.

Also, ironically, that in final game HPZ loads objects of OOZ.. weird.

 

I'm not sure myself, but I can't see why the STI devs wouldn't have known about the time travel.

Brenda Ross was working on a winter variant of her desert level, Tom Payne was working on a cyberpunk variant of his steampunk level and Craig Stitt was working on the level where several time travel cutscenes would've taken place. Surely they would've at least had a vague idea.

And as far as that document goes? It's from Tom Payne, regarding enemy distribution. Assuming that the connected zones were meant to share enemies, they likely would've been time period counterparts, based on what we can tell from the Banper document.

 

Well, there was the infamous language barrier. And there was that interview where one of the western devs explained that connection between the desert and winter zones, yet never mentioned anything about them being counterparts from different timezones.

There was also that interview where they were asked why HTZ reused EHZ's graphics, and their response was basically "it was decided to have EHZ and HTZ share assets and place them apart enough that players wouldn't notice the recycling" (Right, like that would fool us...) Once again, no mention of time travel.

 

WHO THE FUCK IS THIS GUY

 

It's much earlier version of Tails. Somebody should recreate this in sprite and put in game

 

A video about time travel Sonic 2 stuff. Thinking of it, it took YT a while to start putting out this info. Maybe they waited for Retro to uncover more?

 

I bet "Game Facts" gets about 10% of their facts wrong... like most folks on YouTube. Nonetheless, it's nice to see this get some attention. I'll watch the video later. Good find.

 

Olympus is from Greek Mythology. Aquatic Ruin isn’t on the map is it? That one has ancient Greek architecture everywhere. So from that I think Olympus is Aquatic Ruin.
Also, there’s the fact that Olympus is in the middle of water on the map.

 

That's how I see it. No other spot on the maps fits Emerald Isle/Aquatic Ruin as far as I can tell.

Plus the ARZ background fits Olympus' placement on the map if you're looking north:

 

I don't think that Olympus is a regular level. The unique round label on the map must mean that it's special in some way, just like Warp Point is. It's not labeled as a Zone either, it's just Olympus. Besides, it's a Greek temple in pristine condition, nothing like the almost entirely devastated and sunken ruins that you go through in Aquatic Ruin.

If I had to guess, Aquatic Ruin hadn't been conceptualized yet by the time these maps were drawn, with Blue Lake/Ocean representing a very early vision of the level.



Besides, doesn't ARZ have hollow logs that you can walk through and leaves on the foreground? I can certainly imagine it being an alternate timeline version of Wood Zone, just like Blue Lake Zone is.

 

I think Emerald Isle looks more like ARZ than Blue Lake:

The name fits too, if one assumes that ARZ/EIZ = Olympus, considering Olympus is on an isle.


Changing subjects, looking back into this, I think it has some interesting implications:

"Death Egg escapes again. Warp from Hidden Palace."

Since Sonic revisited Hidden Palace to warp right after the Death Egg escaped, the implication seems to be that the DE timewarped, so Sonic proceeded to do the same to give chase.

Which obviously implies the Death Egg had timewarping capabilities. I don't think that was known?

The "again" also implies it did this before, implying by extension that the Death Egg is present in more than one timezone, even if it's only visited by the player in the ruined present.

Could it be that the Death Egg is responsible for the destruction of the island in the ruined past?

 

I'm still not convinced that Olympus is ARZ (The unique round label for its name, the lack of a "Zone"-suffix and the temple being in good condition speak volumes to me), but let's not dwell on that any further.

That Death Egg hypothesis is really interesting and honestly makes a lot of sense. Maybe Death Egg is the Time Machine that Yasuhara described?

 

Olympus is Hidden Palace/Hidden Shrine.

We know this because Yasuhara pointed to it during his presentation and said "the shrine in the middle".

 

This was debated in the last pages. Someone pointed it out, and my stance is that it's contradicted by the design documents multiple times.

Also, did he explicitly call it "Hidden Shrine" (or "Hidden Palace")? Because there might have been more than one shrine planned for the game.

 

Or it’s a case of repurposed graphics mixed together from multiple zones and time periods.