I think this is the most likely of possibilities, developer or sub contractor given a spec, to his mind delivers it, Sega say it's not good enough / not what we wanted and dispute ensues, and eventually a payout / agreement. It would explain the complete lack of any information from anywhere about it - not just from Sega, but from the developer or sub contractor who developed it. We don't know how far down the line R2 was before it was scrapped, but it is surprising that there are no assets that have been found after all these years, and it's my feeling that the level was quite far into development - quite a bit of time and money already spent before it was scrapped. R2 is something I'd like to see resolved. Think it was mentioned earlier, sound test 10 in Sonic 2, what is that little piece of music for? I'd also like to find out a bit about the 2 player stages in Sonic 3 - conceptually there are some really interesting ideas there that would have been nice to see fleshed out into full zones - Azure Lake I always thought was beautiful. Where they scrapped 1 player zone ideas? Balloon park clearly gets its inspiration from Carnival Night, and Desert Place from Sandopolis. Endless mine?
I always saw Lava Reef as the inspiration for Endless Mine, with a little of Mystic Cave sprinkle on it. But who knows if Lava Reef was already a thing by that point.
Lava Reef is present, albeit broken, in a Sonic 3 proto. Endless Mine is there too, with few changes. (just to mention a timeline)
For starters, I'd love to see early versions of Sonic Generations (back when it was called Sonic Anniversary). There's lots of interesting speculation about that game, things you hear or put together yourself; like the original pitch just being Modern Sonic and Classic Sonic wasn't added to the game until later in development. There's also evidence to suggest that "Sonic Anniversary" was meant to release on Wii, DS, etc. but after an internal delay (adding Classic Sonic?) they spun the Wii and DS versions of Sonic Anniversary off to become Sonic Colors. The DS version of Sonic Colors even resembles Sonic Generations, structurally. I'd love to know how much the game changed over development or how much of it was always set in stone. More than the broken PSP build of Sonic Anniversary that's floated around out there, I'd love to see what Sonic Anniversary on the DS and Wii looked like. The few readable assets we've gotten out of the PSP version of Anniversary suggests it went on to become Sonic Generations for the 3DS, but the DS and Wii versions of Anniversary would've been wholly unique beasts. Was there a version of Mushroom Hill Zone built in the Sonic Colors variant of Hedgehog Engine? Or did it take after the Xbox and Playstation version? There's a lot to uncover. I've also been a huge proponent of wanting to know what happened to Sonic Adventure 2. There's a lot of conjecture out there. I remember Sonic HQ buzzing back in the day over whether or not Tails was in the game, I remember Sonic Team delaying the game to "add more familiar faces" (after which they started showing Tails and Amy in promo videos), there was the whole Official Dreamcast Magazine thing where they described a branching storyline system with a submarine sequence that Takashi Iizuka now apparently claims never existed (even though a branching storyline system was implemented in Shadow the Hedgehog). Concept art has been described that we've never seen of a "Nails the Bat" (Rouge), a "big nosed goblin" (Gerald?), an "angel" (Maria?), and monster made out of nothing but eyeballs (the Biolizard?). There was also the suggestion that originally you only ever played as Sonic, Knuckles, and Eggman, even though by that demo in 2000, there were already lives icons for everyone in the game. I have this image in my mind that Sonic Adventure 2 had an extremely tumultuous development, but it's hard to know how much of that is actually true and how much of that can be blamed on the standards of news coverage we had during the era (which were extremely poor). Edit: Also, the PS3/360 (PS4/Xbone?) version of Sonic Boom. And the PS3/360 version of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, while we're at it.
Sonic Anniversary being DELAYED and then turned into Colors doesn't really make sense when Gemerations came out in the 20th Anniversary year and only a year after Colors itself.
Depends on when Colors started being produced, I guess? I didn't go check what may be know of its development...
I recently completed Sonic 1 on 3DS and it dawned on me that we still don't know much about Sonic The Hedgehog's development on Master System and the relationship between the two games. The Sonic 1 prototype discovered by drx showed us the elements of the Green Hill Zone wall that were scrapped in the final game, but preserved in the 8-bit version. A few concepts have evidently been reworked like Starlight Zone, which became SkyBase Zone. It's speculation on my part, but maybe Spring Yard became the special stage? So... just how dependent on the Mega Drive was the SMS version? Were levels like Jungle Zone, Bridge Zone completely original ideas, or were they based on very early concepts for the Genesis? Why were the Batbrain badnik and 8 bit Marble Zone theme created and never used? I would like to know the answers to these questions someday... If it's not impossible.
Special Stage resembles the Star Light concept art to some extent, and the gameplay is indeed more Spring Yard than Spring Yard zone itself (it even had flippers before Sonic 2), so I'd say the special stage is both zones merged into a new concept since they wouldn't be able to recreat 16-bit special stage beyond the still somehow present crystal blocks. I don't think Sky Base has anything to do with Star Light zone, if you ask me, but I wouldn't discard the air dock and blimp as an unused concept for the main version which became a reality in the 8-bit version. I mean, that's essentially Sky Chase and Wing Fortress, with the ship taking off from Metropolis, and we know how much they like to add still not used stuff from previous games into newer games. The linked lightning nodes are a thing in Wacky Workbench too. Not a clue about Bridge and Jungle zones, but the former's pretty much a variation of Green Hill with a replacement for the see-saws in Star Light zone, so I guess the 8-bit team created that.
They both have scaffolding and traffic cones. I don't think that can be a coincidence. They share the Uni Uni enemy too. Star Light Zone Sky Base The originally planned final boss was very similar to the Master System version, but with the crushing pillars of the Mega Drive version. The ending sequence shows that this battle took place on some kind of "sky base", which then leads to Sonic falling through the sky and being caught by his flying friend, as would happen in Sonic 2. Sky Base definitely seems to have a connection to both Sonic 1's original final level and Star Light Zone.
I can't find it at the moment, but I highly suggest someone finding the article where a dev of the Ristar game gear talked about the development of Ristar for thst platform. In a nutshell, he basically talks about how they got footage and concept art for Ristar for the Genesis on the fly. They'd develop what they thought the Genesis counterpart was going for then later find out they went a different direction. It sounds a shit ton like what likely happened with the sms version of sonic 1.
Good observation! I could swore, I've seen some concept art of Sonic 1 with some kind of balloon (zepellin) but it's probably my imagination. Also, worth noting is that Sonic 1 SMS uses a pixel art of Sonic using a microphone which if I'm not mistaken is based on one of Oshima's sketches / concept art.
I think I can elaborate on this a bit more. When I put this art up on the wiki, I noticed that there seemed to be similarities to some unused sprites from Sky Base. That said, theearly final boss concept took place at what I assume was a mountain base and Eggman retreated into an airplane that Sonic destroyed. There wasn't any "sky base" I'm afraid.
This does lead to an interesting connection though: If this is a mountain base, then consider Scrap Brain's placement on South Island in S1 8-bit: In the mountains, according to the intermission South Island maps.
Actually, on the topic of development info, I'm hoping we can hear more about the "world of nightmares" concept Oshima was talking about in relation to this concept art: I was looking back over the quote that @Blugenesi(Jarty) had in his video (since it has yet to be properly documented on the wiki) and there seems to be some mistranslation in what Oshima's saying. I'm having someone retranslate it, but based on my limited understanding of Japanese, he seems to suggest this was a holdover from a "draft before becoming Sonic". He also said he'd discuss it more on Twitter if he ever found time, but I imagine damage control over Balan Wonderworld has kept him busy. I'll throw in the original text in case someone wants to look it over.
Indeed. In the Sonic 1 tie-in manga, Clock Work (Scrap Brain) was located in or behind some mountains. So I think it's safe to say that the mountain base is just Scrap Brain.
So the translation came back as follows: So while there's nothing to indicate this was a holdover from when Sonic wasn't conceived of yet like I initially believed, there still seems to be info we're not privy to regarding this concept. It's a shame Oshima-san never got around to discussing it.
Don't forget Sky Base is accessed through an elevator, so the dock is still somewhat part of Scrap Brain; the Sky Base was probably referring to the blimp specifically. It's also true you could add a different background to the rightmost side of Final Zone and you'd get the ending of the concept art. The blimp's probably the airplane made bigger and epic. On the topic of Star Light zone, well you're probably right, but it's a dark cloudy place where light comes from lightnings which could come from the clouds behind, so it's quite different from the clear starry skies and the buildings from Star Light, so I think they really reworked it. You could say they had all this concept art and stuff and remixed it a lot sometimes.
According to this tweet by Nishimura, the first screenshot is likely to be what he's talking about - Early in development, the special stage comprised of two independently rotating mazes and you'd have to go between both in order to get the Time Stone (You can see the second maze in the background and the first maze in the foreground). However, they dropped this upon seeing Mario Kart in all of it's Mode 7 glory. I presume the final special stage was inspired by Mario Kart. Going by this, it's pretty likely that the second screenshot is of a later build in which they started cracking on with the Mode 7-esque final special stages.
