New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

You got a non-thumbnail image, maybe?

 

https://twitter.com/Yasuharah/status/1561178527151493120


I was going through some of Yasuhara's old tweets and came across this.

The Metropolis concept was originally drawn as "The Interior of a Blimp", whatever that is supposed to hint at.

Now things will get even more confusing. Was the stage once conceptualized as an airship? If so, it must have been very, very early on, before any other drawn maps were considered. Could it be an unused Sonic 1 concept or something crazy like that? The text on the right even hints that you at one point blew it up and it fell on fire or something?

Edit: https://twitter.com/Yasuharah/status/1561221375557193730
He also claims this idea did become the partial basis for Wing Fortress... eventually.

(And the page behind it might be the barely seen early concept for Ice Cap!)

 

As I already said elsewhere, the last two acts of the 8-bit version of Sonic 1 take place in a blimp: http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(8-bit)/Maps#Sky_Base_Zone.

 

I don't want to doubt the man himself, but...I think he's confused.


You can clearly see that text was digitally edited over the original blurb of "Metropolis". And so the Metropolis image came first.

This process was done for a lot of images Yamaguchi drew, like Secret Jungle clearly being repurposed for Mushroom Hill, where you can see the same thing:

 

Do we have all of the original concept images like this by chance that they've made throughout the games?

 

These drawings were probably used to choose between a various range of level tropes, which ones to use for the next game. They probably do not reflect the intended zone name, even if some were finally used-as-is.

 

This is precisely what I thought of. I'm guessing the metropolis zone concept art was reused for flying battery zone early on in Sonic 3's production and he's gotten it confused a bit.

 

Good calls, gentleman. I think that makes perfect sense if Ice Cap's art is right behind it too, given that it would've come next in Beta S3. The night setting for Beta Flying Battery leading into Ice Cap makes the most sense there (although it does hint at the fortress at one point going up in flames and maybe even crashing, which is still interesting), and the font definitely matches the "repurposed Sonic 3" era material.

I'd say this at least gives us a more concrete look at how Sonic 2 concepts evolved into Sonic 3. Really makes me want to consider more about how Genocide/Cyber City unused ideas could have combined with unused plans for an extended Death Egg Zone in S2 to become what we finally got in S3&K.

 

More importantly, Yasuhara's tweet proves he has a shitton of unseen development material with him still that begs to be shared. I think Ice Cap's image is indeed right behind it; I can just barely make out the words "tunnel" and "avalanche".

Which means if he wanted to, Yasuhara could drop another bomb like he did in 2017. But given his reactions to replies in those tweets, I don't think he's interested.

 

What I'd love to know, is how much material they have of the SVP tests for Sonic 3. Like, were there any concept art or anything for that branch of Sonic 3?

 

mind you that the rhombuses involved...the layout so to speak. The regions they appear in are very obvious when you look at the map as they have custom-made slanted halls. not a lick of this bit of the layout survived to the final as the rhombuses were obviously scrapped.



(and of course we have graphics for the Genocide City rhombuses which is why I keep bringing them up, because it's super rad that something so weird can be traced to a specific era now)

 

By the way, I always assumed that Wood Zone was somehow related to Metropolis with its tube paths, unless that was just a coincidence:
Is it still up in the air whether there was any connection? Didn’t Wood Zone have the early Metropolis music, or was that from something else?

(Sidenote: the art was so flat with very little depth. I wonder if this was even “final.”)

 

Wood Zone has the early Metropolis music and was often alleged to be the "past" version of Metropolis, but I don't know the actual validity of that idea.

 

I've always doubted a connection except in the minds of fans. Wood Zone, though. That was probably my biggest surprise from the Simon Wai proto. I'd known about Hidden Palace. Wood Zone was a real surprise to me personally back then.

 

The idea that Wood Zone was the past of Metropolis Zone was pretty much thrown out when the maps surfaced and showed the two were in the same time period.

 

I believe Wood Zone was confirmed to be the past version of Casino Night, which I admit MIGHT correlate with the conveyor belts, the tree 'chutes' and the 'flipper' branches in the concept art.

As for the level art, I think Brenda Ross stated they only got in about 50% of the art before they ditched it.

 

Even in the final version with the "rest" of Wood Zone (when you use cheat codes to acess it) it plays Metropolis Zone song.

 

I'm not sure why people assume that the teleportation chutes from Metropolis and the tree holes from Wood are meant to be the same thing. They're very similar on a conceptual level, yes, brown tunnels with holes in the wall that get Sonic from place to place, but the Metropolis pipes are very obviously high tech whereas the trees from Wood seem to be inspired by something else- possibly akin to Endor from Star Wars? (wouldn't be the only time Sonic 2 referenced it after all) Even then, other games have also done the same "tunnels through trees with holes in the trunk to see through" thing. I can think of Tree Tops from Spyro 1 off the top of my head.

Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. Never really got the connection and the old concept maps seemingly disprove it wholesale, so I dunno.

 

I could see the tree paths corresponding to the Casino Night elevators too. There’s definitely nothing decisive here. Ah well.

 

I thought it was the big tree from the first level of world of illusion that Donald falls through