You bring up a good point, but this does still not proof that the zone pictured is Sand Shower. Once again, there is nothing to say that it's sand shower. In fact, there is actually more proof that the screenshot is Dust Hill. Earlier, Rika Chou pointed out that the clouds in this screenshot are of Green Hill zone and this would explain why Dust Hill was the bad present of Green Hill zone. I think this is enough evidence to proof this screenshot is Dust Hill, and not a level that didn't even make it into the prototype.
Not that I'm getting into it too much, but how could it be the present anything if it has a dinobot in the picture? Wouldn't that imply it was a past level?
We connected the level concepts to the level order in data, but how about the music too? Equating each zone with the song at (zone+1) in the sound test: 0. Green Hill - Competition Results 1. Ocean Wind - Emerald Hill 2. Wood Zone - Mystic Cave 2P 3. Sand Shower - Oil Ocean 4. Metropolis - Metropolis 5. Rock World? - Hill Top 6. Tropical Plant? - Aquatic Ruin 7. Hill Top - Casino Night 2P 8. Olympus? - Casino Night 9. Blue Lake? - Death Egg 10. Oil Ocean - Mystic Cave 11. Dust Hill - Emerald Hill 2P 12. Casino Night - Sky Chase 13. Chemical Plant - Chemical Plant 14. Genocide City - Wing Fortress A few zones don't fit, but a surprising number do. Metropolis and Chemical Plant connect exactly, and most of the others fit reasonably well (though not all of them). It's interesting that Sand Shower lines up with the Oil Ocean music, and Dust Hill with the Emerald Hill 2P music. It's also worth noting that the very next track in the list is the unused track $10.
What if Tails was supposed to be a mutant two-tail fox from the future that Sonic would have teamed up with? :o
Unless I understand this wrong, this is highly speculative, especially when the order in the sound test doesn't always coordinate with the order of which song was programmed into the game first. You might think that most of them fit, another might not. I think they assigned a song to the level based on what the level was actually going to be, not the order of the songs in the sound test. Sure, there might certainly be a few instances where levels match up, but this isn't really surprising.
Keep in mind that Sonic 3's sound order correlates with the original level order, in which Flying Battery Zone was between Carnival Night Zone and IceCap Zone. It's interesting to at least try to conjecture here based on that.
In the case of Sonic 1 and Sonic 3 and Knuckles, the music is in the same order as the original (and internal) level order. I'd be surprised if Sonic 2 wasn't also built this way. What I'm not saying, however, is that the music found corresponds directly to each zone. I'm suggesting that it may have been the case originally, with songs shuffled about or replaced for whatever reason since then.
Actually, the order of all the music in the sound test for Simon Wai is completely different than this. Some of them are even repeat tracks: 80 - Nothing 81 - Casino Night 2P VS (Oil Ocean) 82 - Emerald Hill 83 - Metropolis 84 - Casino Night 85 - Mystic Cave 86 - Mystic Cave 2P VS (Hidden Palace) 87 - Aquatic Ruin 88 - Death Egg 89 - Special Stage 8A - Options 8B - Options 8C - Final Boss 8D - Chemical Plant 8E - Boss 8F - Sky Chase (Level 09) 90 - Oil Ocean (Desert/Level 03) 91 - Oil Ocean (Desert/Level 03) 92 - Wing Fortress 93 - Emerald Hill 2P VS (Level 06) 94 - Competition Results 95 - Super Sonic 96 - Hill Top 97 - Hill Top 98 - 1UP (Sonic 1) 99 - Title (Sonic 1) 9A - Act Complete (Sonic 1) 9B - Game Over (Sonic 1) 9C - Continue (Sonic 1) 9E~9F - Chaos Emerald (Sonic 1) The only thing I can think of for the reason this order is that this is just the order when the sound data was initially added to the game. Some repeat tracks could've been placeholders for when new music was going to be added.
Just for fun..........My Metropolis zone layout to match Chrome Gadget zone layout and overlap lol. I kept the wall bumpers the same size, but doubled the size for Chrome gadget tiles. Spoiler
Hey, it sure looks like you could make a cave level going under that long-ago crumbled Green Hill, which is incidentially called Dust Hill just like Mystic Cave is in the prototypes. :v: In all seriousness, though, we already had actual proof (as in, a scanned dev document) for the desert level and the "rock" zone being the same place only in different time zones, and now we know that their names were "Rock World" and "Sand Shower", with an additional "Dust Hill" level that's somewhere else entirely. Maybe we should start prioritizing the tangible proof we have over foggy memories.
Something that bothers me a lot is that Hill Top has the green hill palmtrees (makes sense since if it is it's past) but Hill Top's tree (the fucking and ugly tree) shows up on blue lake and woods. It makes sense because, I mean, it's a tree in the woods, but they ended up on hill top somehow. Also I see Sand Shower more like a gulf/beach rather than a desert. Anyway I would want to know what happened to all the forest that was there in the past, and why it's called Rocks zone when it clearly looks like a forest. But I am writing this post while I scroll up and down to see the images and now I see that 'Tropical Plant zone' looks like a bunch of rocks and 'Rock zone' looks like a tropical forest, so titles may have been switched. From where I see it, Sonic chases Eggman in 'Now'. Eggman travels back in time and Sonic chases him there on 'Past'. But Eggman planted the seed and when you come back to present, it has that heavily eggmanized nameless time, which I will call 'Bad Present'. Then once you get to Genocide/Cyber City 1 -it stands where the warp point was, so my guess is that Eggman will use it's energy to keep control of the time- you can sort of undo Eggman's massive colonization, but the time will never be the same and that's why we end up in 'Now 2'. Edit: hope that track $10 is just for a cutscene, because I couldn't do 2 full acts with that ear-piercing music.
This is all fantastic stuff - I've not really got much more to add, but absolutely fascinating to read and absorb. So much of what we know about the game's dev history has been changed by 5 images - and the level order backing it up only confirms it all. Just wow.
Not much I can add on this subject considering there's eight pages of this but no doubt people will be grabbing those recently found level names for hacks, fan games and other stuff.
Oh my god, I've just realized something. Remember those Sonic 2 comics which took place in prehistoric and medieval times, with brown Amy? Those that made us go HAHA WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO WITH SONIC 2, yes.
Didn't one of the development team once state that there was plans for a zone themed around a circus at one point, but was dropped before anything really got started?
No, he said he remembered drawing a level with big clown heads but he didn't just work on Sonic while at SEGA. I think it was for Jester. EDIT: Found the quote. According to Tim Skelly: EDIT 2: Look what I've just found: ...Olympus? :O
