Any number of his works for licensed properties also look just fine. It seems like Sonic and a few others were the outliers because they were largely games for which the publisher was trying to eschew the sensibilities of the original Japanese art, likely leaving him with dubious/little reference material for their character models (and given the time period, he likely had a very limited turnaround time from commission to final product and certainly couldn't just Google "SONIC JP BOXART"). For another example, Mean Bean Machine's box certainly looks like AoStH, which had an established look: Of course, I'm now noticing the layering between Grounder and the platform Robotnik is standing on makes no sense, but I guess in a way that's true to DiC's litany of animation errors.
Oh cool. I've never knowingly seen any of his other work before. For the record though, I never doubted his capabilities (never considered them, actually), but seeing him draw Sonic with a decent design in Spinball makes all the difference nonetheles. It's weird that SoA were so adamant about their design for Sonic. Clearly it worked because he was a roaring success when the series debuted, but honestly I always thought he looked so ugly with the spherical head, mohawk and fat face and torso going on. Surely they could have gotten him to look more "badass" without trashing the design so much.
The Mega-CD did terribly when it was finally released overseas and SEGA of Europe was restructured, leaving Japan with most control over everything and cancelling many releases of "less important" and third party games (like Splatterhouse 3). Not sure if any of this applied to SoA as well. You can find some info on this scattered across the articles and posted comments in the blog of an ex-SEGA of Spain employee, over here (those who don't speak Spanish may need Google Translate).
A bit off topic, but the egg with the beak poking out in Greg's Taz-Mania boxart (first link)...looks pretty familiar, doesn't it? :v: By the by, the colored Sonic & Knuckles sketch does look rather neat, if still containing a handful of design errors. Had it been finalized, that probably could had worked as an alternative Sonic & Knuckles boxart cover. Sorta like the type you could use as a reversible cover.
Looks like they originally wanted Toxic Caves to be two separate levels. I'm guessing Underground Caves became simply the bottom platform of the level, where you still have water, while the mid-upper parts were the Toxic parts of the caverns. They also did CG renderings of that map, we can see it in a lot of early previews, but they were either cut due to space reasons, or they were never more than mockups. And possibly because he is escaping on a ship that might have space travel capabilities, like all the other ones he has in the other games. The fight itself already happens way above the clouds, and he is only going upwards, not arced, so he probably needs his pod to be airtight. What is weird is that on the Spinball cover, they changed Sonics design to look more Japanese, but they changed Robotnik to look like his American cartoon version.
Bumping this because the images have disappeared from Photobucket since they were posted and I don't know if they've been documented anywhere but this topic. Has anyone saved these? (If so, please disregard)
Isn't Photobucket simply holding them hostage until you sign up for whatever their silly paid account system is? Buyatari might still be able to access the pictures if they're on his personal Photobucket account. Doing some quick snooping googling, it looks like he does indeed have a personal Photobucket account he uses for linking images (at least, certainly did back in the day, also holy crap those PR discs-) so I'm led to believe the Spinball images are probably still fine and Buyatari can hopefully re-upload them at some point if they're still kicking around.
The Jackal over at Sega-16 was able to get them: https://imgur.com/a/AMmfHQ2 He used this Chrome Extension to get around the PhotoBucket Paywall/Hotlink Filter.
