Sonic Awakening? Greek Sonic Storybook game? Never heard/read of those... What were they? And yes, I'd also like to see what S4E3 had in store... ^^"
Awakening was listed on Silver's voice actor's resume online or some such. Nothing else was known other than it existed. The storybook games (Secret Rings/Black Knight) were supposed to be a trilogy. They did a poll about what genre or myth people wanted and Greek mythology won and then it went off the radar with no further updates. It's one of those things were there are so many dark corners of the franchise most people don't even realize are there unless they pay constant attention, and even then they get swept under the carpet since nothing is even known of them anyways. One of those things where I wish Sega would grace us with another round of random concept art, but from all of these lesser known projects someday. Though the Saturn Era Sonic Adventure renders were gorgeous.
- Knuckles Chaotix on Saturn - More Sonic Xtreme builds (there's one with Metal Sonic Boss fight) - Sonic Generations PSP - Sonic DS tech demo - Sonic Heroes Dreamcast (if anything exist at all. I remember that around 2005-2006 on official Sega/sonic websites, there was a list of Sonic games for each system. Heroes Was listed on Dreamcast. Possibly a simple mistake, but one has to wonder if they ever started something on DC)
I'm VERY interested in the 5-month gap in prototypes for Sonic CD. Our current prototype already has evidence of having stuff purged from it, and we've seen a lot of interesting magazine shots that fall between 0.02 and 510. Other than that, the gap between Nick Arcade and Simon Wai for Sonic 2 interests me, and there's plenty of Sonic 1 mysteries left.
Sorry, but it bothers me whenever that shot we've not seen in higher quality yet is filed under Saturn-era Sonic Adventure - although it's almost certainly a mockup, if it's using assets intended for use in-game then it looks much more like something produced after they'd already begun to move the game to the Dreamcast. The Sonic model in particular looks very similar to the final DC model in terms of structure/smoothness etc., but it's still using Sonic's classic design. In fact, it looks very similar to (and almost certainly is) the classic Sonic model still seen on the 1UP icon and some mission cards in the final game.
Wasn't the SatAM demo for Genesis just an animation test/mockup thing and not actually playable? I swear I remember being told thats what it was.
In the case of the SatAM game, it's very likely all that was produced was that proof of concept video STI put together. It wasn't uncommon for them to make mock-up videos and then develop the game once the project was approved, Spinball being a good example of this process. The DS demo might be interesting though. Based on how it played, I get the feeling it inspired or is connected in some way to the development of Secret Rings. The way you slide back and forth on the touchscreen seems similar to the waggle controls on the Wii.
The cutscene probably merely came from concept art sent to Toei for animation. The animation probably took them several months to complete, and if I had to guess the animation was probably done before any real work had been done on the game (not to mention, the need to convert the animation to a SEGA CD friendly format, that probably took some time too). Toei did do their own versions of the concept art for Sonic that originated for Sonic 1. If I had to make an educated guess, they were probably sent a copy of the design "bible" for Sonic CD and maybe were given a rough idea of what Sonic Team/SEGA wanted, and TOEI put together some story boards and got SEGA approval, and then the antlion badnick scene was put in based on that artwork, but the stage never manifested in the end due to time constraints or otherwise. I can't tell from reading the info pages, but are the sprites linked to R2 from the CD development period or are they recreated based on documentation from the development period in the 90s?
It sounds like you're talking about the Sonic Jam-esque low-poly model seen in the majority of those concept images - Sky Chase does indeed use a similar model in the final DC game. However, I'm talking about the one image in that section that we don't have a high quality shot of - the image of Sonic floating in the air in an area similar to the prototype Windy Valley, which uses a much more detailed model more similar to the DC version's (with a much higher polycount, triple-segmented limbs, jointed hands etc.) rather than the ones featuring the more Saturn-looking Sonic. Apologies for any confusion.
Yeah, you can still see the model in the mission cards from the final game. Spoiler: large picture There's been some attempts to restore it, but I don't think anyone has had a clear shot of the model yet.
One more for the list - unless I missed something recently, we still don't know which Chaotix build these unused Eggman graphics are hiding in. I mean, presumably the folks who ripped and uploaded them to TSR do, but I've not seen any record of where it was discovered, and the query in the comments on TSR hasn't been answered as of yet. Nobody seems to have found it during the recent efforts to dig through the protos in more detail, either, though that's very much an ongoing thing. I notice TSR lists the uploaders as "Dolphman" and "Varion" - @Dolphman and @Varion Icaria, is that you guys by any chance? If so, are either of you able to help resolve this mystery?
I'd truthfully love to hear from Chaotix developers exactly what this unfinished mess of a game was planned to be like originally. Sure games like Sonic 2 suffered in their development crunch too, but you can at least make some sense of what the base structure is since a large amount of it was still complete. There's so much stuff inside Chaotix that went to waste though and we have no idea what it was meant to be.
Might be something to bring up in the Adventures With Chaotix thread since @Black Squirrel has been digging through those protos. There's quite a lot from the Chaotix Builds that's not documented surprisingly.
It wouldn't surprise me if theres stuff we still haven't found it Chaotix, that game is something else.
So this one was almost definitely a typo; during Sonic Adventure 2's development it was known that it was to be a final farewell to Sonic being a first-party mascot. Sonic Advance, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, and Sonic Adventure: DX were released in the years following before there was ever a hint that Heroes was ever an inkling of an idea.
