UNSEEN(??) SONIC 1 BETA ART

Awesome, thanks for sharing! I wonder whose style is that. Ohshima's, maybe?

 

If the last part of Final Zone was meant to take place outside, those unused "distant explosion" sprites make a lot more sense. Good work.

 

Welcome to Sonic Retro!

These are very nice discoveries, thank you for sharing!

 

I always imagined those would appear at the GHZ part of the ending if the player managed to give eggman the "final hit", considering how there's another, different storyboard within retro wiki, which, which basically shows the same "concept", but in a more complex sequence and including more sprites but said "final hit" always happen regardless. If it got simplified, I get a feeling it was for time constraints, because once you defeat the final boss, what comes next is filled of tiny bugs. So it would be no surprise if the "distant explosion" objects were not made for the same reason.

 

A bit like in Sonic 1 8bits' ending when Sonic teleports and land a final hit on Eggman ?

 

Like in 8-bit Sonic 1 where Sonic is teleported above an escaping Eggman, yeah?

Edit: Ninja'd by Adamis. SIGH

 

These are great! Thanks for sharing them! Is anyone able to translate the text?

The SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works book has an earlier version of the final boss and ending storyboards. The final boss arena has a lot in common with the 8-bit version, with Eggman behind a force field. The exterior/platform shows that the stage is high up in the sky and there are towers and a satellite dish in the background - quite different from any Clock Work Zone/Scrap Brain Zone concept art we've seen. Eggman takes off in a strange plane (no Egg Mobile yet) and after Sonic lands the final hit he keeps falling until he is saved by his parrot/parakeet bandmate, Sharps. Then they land in Green Hill Zone, where the rest of the Sonic Band and the small animals are celebrating, and Sonic does the same jump pose as in the final.

It does all make me wonder how heavily the 8-bit version's Sky Base was based upon abandoned ideas for the 16-bit version. The boss certainly was.

I don't think these are on the wiki anywhere.

There's also concept art of Eggman parachuting, but it's unclear what this was intended for.

 

Sure. Please note, I'm not fluent in the language, I have likely fucked up somewhere, just trying to help.





Text and translations:

EDIT: Made some translation changes.

 

Hmm. So there was always(?) supposed to be just the six Emeralds, unless maybe this was later on when they settled on the number.

Also, Sonic does three times damage to the Eggmobile, yet it goes down in just one hit. So Eggman had a three-hit quota instead of the whopping eight?

 

I'm thinking he had 3 instead of 1.

 

Thanks for translating those! So it seems that there was never any real purpose to landing that final hit on Eggman, just a player satisfaction thing.

 

Apologies, when re-reading the translation I realised it was not very clear.

"ボスは3回以上ダメージをあたえる説定とほす" Is literally like "Give the boss damage 3 times or more", thought my translation would suffice, but I didn't stress the "3回"/"3 times" part enough, that's my bad. I believe this is stating that the boss can be damaged 3 or more times, though the outcome of a single hit is not specified. I assume it means you would need to hit the boss 3 times to cause it to enter the damaged state that you get from a single hit in the final.

Also while I'm apologising for poor translations: The final item, "map" should be "figure". For some reason I read 図 (figure) as 地図 (map).

EDIT: Updated my post above to fix some issues.

 

Awesome! I quite like the idea of the last part of Final Zone being outside, I guess since it gives it a better connection with the rest of South Island (since Sonic 1's zones are pretty disjointed for the most part). Also, where did you come across this art?

 

An interesting find indeed! This actually makes sense of one of the layout choices in Final Zone; the foreground wall between the boss area and the Eggmobile area presumably exists because they thought they'd need to hide the background layer long enough to switch it back to the 'outside' background used in Act 1. A shame the switch wasn't implemented in the final game as it would have made the end a little more cinematic - would be interesting to see a hack implementing it some day. Ditto for Eggman's flight path differing significantly depending on whether or not the player managed to hit him during his attempted eacape.

 

Funny they actually mention keeping the player from being able to jump off the ledge, because they didn't implement that. I remember the very first time I ever beat Sonic 1, I accidentally jumped off the edge of Final Zone and had to redo the boss, haha.

 

they keep you from jumping off the ledge only when eggman escapes. Most likely a similar issue as the signposts