What really was the Sound Test #10 in STH2 going to be used for?

This whole thread in a nutshell. I could claim Emerald Hill Zone was originally meant to play Star Light Zone's music, and even though that's clearly wrong, I have more evidence to back it up (the Nick Arcade proto) than about two-thirds of the "theories" in this thread.

 

Love all the discussion here

I personally think that the tracks for levels that ended up not being used (either not moving past concept stage or being cut during development) were repurposed for levels or features that were conceptualized after music composition took place, and believe there is supporting evidence that points to this.

From Naka:



Naka specifically states Masa worked off of concept images during composition of the music.



Here, Masa also recounts that he worked off of only still images. This likely means that music composition began PRIOR to anything significant being done on the game-dev side of things.



It sounds like Sonic Team relayed specific stage concepts to Masa to aid in composing.



And, most interestingly (imo), here he recounts specifically working off of provided visuals for each stage. He SPECIFICALLY mentions an ice level, and creating "ice-like" music to pair with it.

Regarding what ended up as 2p music, I do not believe that Naka would've handed Masa level art and told him "compose two songs for these ones specifically". In fact, I don't think that the devs even decided which levels would have 2p versions until later on in development, as you can play ANY level in 2p mode in the Simon Wai beta (as long as the level didn't have water).

Due to the timing of the composition of the music (composition taking place prior to any significant game dev being completed), the fact that Masa composed tracks with specific levels in mind based on still images, and the likelihood that they didn't finalize their 2p plans until far after music composition was complete, I believe all point towards certain music having been meant for other levels that were cut during (or even previous to) the programming phase of development. There are a ton of levels that were planned, and likely never got past the concept art phase (we know this as absolute fact). But if the music composition was completed during the time that those levels were planned, why wouldn't music have been composed for those levels? I believe music WAS composed (like for the ice stage), and that instead of throwing that music away when the planned stages changed, they repurposed the tracks. Why waste completed tracks? It wouldn't make sense from a financial or developmental standpoint.

 

Where are these scans from?

 

Liner notes from the Sonic 1 and 2 soundtrack.

(Located here in the Retro wiki)

 

All we can do is speculate, really.

Here's what Naka said about Hidden Palace: http://xbox.gamespy.com/articles/654/654750p4.html

And Craig Stitt: https://randomsonicnet.org/srz/index.php?page=interviews/cs.htm

So Hidden Palace Zone was:

*A "secret" level
*That you'd encounter by collecting Chaos Emeralds
*Where Sonic would be granted his Super Sonic powers

Yasuhara's maps have two non-Zone locations - Warp Point and Olympus. In his presentation he referred to Sonic activating a "Hidden Shrine" to time travel, but the maps themselves imply that "Warp Point" is where Sonic time travels. The Warp Point pyramid exists in most of the maps, but Olympus only appears in the Ancient Time map. It seems like a good possibility that one or both of these ideas eventually evolved into the Hidden Palace Zone described by Naka and Stitt.

As for the time travel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-3avMBqJ9s&t=7m11s

"After I started planning, dev schedule was changed. This idea was too ambitious to make a full game in 8 months... So, the story was rewritten and some levels were trimmed off."

Not a very clear timeframe, but it sounds like the time travel story was dropped early. However, news of Sonic 2 having a time travel story did make it into video game magazines at the time, and the Sonic the Hedgehog Book (a Sonic 2 tie-in product, and a spin-off of the then-current manga series) had comic stories set in the Ancient Time and Medieval Time (the two past eras planned for Sonic 2), which I doubt is a coincidence.

Masa's Demo Version of Track #10 doesn't sound like it was intended to loop at all. But the final in-game version was made to loop and assigned to Hidden Palace Zone.

So what would have called for a non-looping tune? Or a tune that loops until the player reaches a certain point?

*Warp Point / Hidden Shrine?
*Olympus?
*Sonic is granted his Super Sonic powers?

These ideas all seem to be interconnected with Hidden Palace Zone.

Or it could have been something we don't know about.

 

Neat - I must have missed this first time around.


The way I'm reading this, and indeed what seems to be a recurring theme in interviews, is that Hirokazu Yasuhara really was the "planner". As in, he had the plan... and nobody else except Yuji Naka seems to have known what the plan was. The art people were kept at arm's length, Masato Nakamura seems to have been given vague instructions, and the default answer to most things out of their immediate sphere of influence seems to be "don't know".

 

Well, Kat just demonstrated that you can also look for actual information in the wiki. =P

Also, nobody has looked into the data for the music track yet.

 

Why was track #10 included in the final game anyway? Was it an oversight? I remember listening to it as a kid wondering why I never heard it in the game...I never knew about hidden palace zone until the internet told me about it in the early 2000s, before that I had no idea about Sonic 2's rushed development cycle.

If there's one thing sws2b taught me, it was to never use speculation without concrete proof and research.

I'll never believe Dust Hill Zone is anything other than Mystic Cave zone.

 

A few months ago, I would disagree, but now that we know "Sand Shower Zone" was a thing, it's hard to call the desert level Dust Hill anymore.

 

Probably dependencies or the like. Not having enough time to remove everything and re-work it all at that point and they left the song in as a bonus track in the final game that went unused.

 

Actually though is it the first unused song?

I guess Sonic 1 MS/GG had the unused Marble Zone rendition but does that count? Also we didn't know about that for ages.

 

Well a form of Marble zones music has been used :v: but huh I wasnt aware of unused S2 MS/GG music.

 

I think this is the only one in the 8-bit Sonic 2:

https://youtu.be/gg9FsT4J4EY

Sounds like it could have been used for a special stage or something, maybe Crystal Egg?

 

Ahh okay, that makes sense! It's a shame Sonic 2 was such a rushed game, it started off way too ambitious I guess.

 

At least it didn't end in disaster like Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) did. Because it sounds like all that stuff did eventually catch up to them. Think about it. Sonic 3 was so rush that only half a game was released and they had to come up with a way to make the two halves whole again.

 

Sonic games being rushed is a series tradition

 

GOTTA GO FAST

 

I think somebody absolutely would have. They wanted to put Desert Dazzle and Final Fever in to Sonic CD and were denied, Sonic Team was upset when an unfinished boss rush was discovered in Sonic 2 Mobile and forced them to remove it (even though there was no legitimate way to access the feature).

Every single thing they did went through a meticulous approval process. The question is whether or not anyone at Sonic Team still knew. Takashi Iizuka came in to the fold for Sonic 3, and Kazuyuki Hoshino's first gig was with Sonic CD, 5000 miles away from where Sonic 2 was being developed.

The REAL question then would be whether or not anyone would even bother contacting somebody that did know.

This has already been answered, but to answer it in clearer detail, it essentially has to do with the way data gets packed in to ROM files like this. It's not like Windows, where a file is an icon on a desktop. Data, real raw data, is like a book of words.

So let's say you tell the game, "there is music on page 8, line 4." Two weeks later, a paragraph gets removed from page 6. What happens when the game looks for the music on page 8, line 4? It's not there anymore, and the references to that music's location have to be updated. After a certain point, the location of data becomes "set in stone" because moving it around (or removing it outright) would screw up everything to come afterwards.

So if it's not used, but also not causing any problems, then it's best to just leave it alone.

This is also why you get stuff like the Hydrocity music bug in Sonic 3, where you can trigger a different version of the zone boss music by letting the drowning music start and then grabbing some air. The locations of where the game thinks the music is were changed and not all of the old references were updated.