For those of you not seeing this on Facebook. The original artwork by Greg Wray has turned up and is now part of a private collection. Not mine.
This is nice. I have to ask; why did it take do long for artists to learn how Sonic's eyes work? I get that they're not the most normal things, but you think that they would look at images like that and see that it wasn't quite right.
Aside from Sonic's wonky eye, the other thing that interests me is Knuckles' mono-eye, akin to how he's teased in the American Sonic 3 box art. It's not something I've really thought about before, but now it's reminding me of this: For the longest time I always assumed that this was something cobbled together for a magazine preview (something like this), but the mono-eye is consistent with both this artwork and Sonic 3's NA box art. Was Knuckles originally slated to receive a redesign for the American market akin to Sonic, Tails and Robotnik, or is this just an error that nobody bothered to correct?
But still for meming!! XD Awesome I also highlight Tails' artwork, different to Sonic 2 USA cover artwork.
It looks like a beard, but it's in fact his red shirt, that gets mixed up with the reddish brown of his moustache.
I used to think so too, but if that's the case, where is his chin? It looks weird no matter I look at it.
While it does come off as a beard I think it's supposed to be some form of weirdly applied motion blur on his mustache
I think y'all are confusing Greg Wray's work with Greg Martin's. Very similar in style and name, but they're not the same. Hence why tails looks different. lol Greg Martin did the work for most box art genny titles, including Sonic 2. Sadly, Martin did pass away a few years back. R.I.P. to a great artist. http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=5&threadid=117907
The only place I've ever seen this image before is an issue of UK magazine SEGA XS - specifically Issue 6, which had an extensive Sonic 3 walkthrough with full level maps painstakingly patched together from screenshots (including maps for what we later found out were Knuckles' routes, which they bothered to map even though they weren't accessible outside of debug mode at the time...!). The artwork was used multiple times throughout the article, and is shaded in the same style as the magazine's cover art (an image of Sonic bursting through the cover of the magazine), so I'd assume it's something the magazine commissioned themselves from the same artist who drew that cover.