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

They'd be well within their rights to permanently paywall it. Let's not get carried away.

I'm a huge Phil Ochs fan and this guy called David Wong has hoarded his only recording of his demo tracks for his final unreleased album for ten years. I've asked numerous times for him to release and he has refused each time. Let's get perspective on how bad this can be.

 

Few massive and interesting prototypes that can fully, absolutely remade our thoughts about development of games, and 3 papers with maps of level is not same, but idk.
As much as I think- I'm more and more think that I should stop think. I do it very bad

Also, hi to video game foundation, or however it calls. They probably do the great job, but I hope in the future they will learn to avoid such controversial situations. This is very ambiguous, but I hope that everything will be fine.

 

Hidden Palace has an exceedingly good track record of releasing prototypes. Perhaps the best record. Any delay is usually to recoup costs because prototypes are expensive, or because the actual dumping and verification process isn't always straightforward.


If, as probably was the case, they ended up with a few Sonic prototypes dumped at around the same time, they've earned the right to stagger the releases out a little. I said some time earlier in this topic - it might even be preferable to do it this way so you're not bombarded with content all at once. But this is very different to teasing months in advance, disappearing from the internet, then potentially introducing an awkward paywall.

 

Being within their rights doesn't mean it sets a good precedent for this community, however Frank has not been shown to be paywalling his releases so far this month in a substantial way (again only 24 hour periods so far, if any), so I repeat, let's not get too carried away.

Again, if I were a mod, I'd lock this now. The situation has now seemingly changed. We've finally reached a dead end for the discussion until new material releases, and a release as potentially large as what's been hinted at may even warrant an entirely new thread anyway (though the large amounts of good info in this one does need to be archived in some capacity).

 

Yes, but, still a crappy thing to do though.

 

Key difference is that HP didn't explicitly use the Sonic Month streams as revenue generation tools.

Also helps that there was one proto that would have immediately outshined all the others (Sonic 3) if they had been dropped as a batch. I also can't imagine that HP could've held all those back for more than half a year to do it.

 

I agree with HEDGESMFG, seems like the discourse here is getting fueled by one person just hypothesizing that they're going to paywall this stuff, when in fact the VGHF is a non-profit and hasn't done such a thing before. I think we've all become a bit spoiled by how prototype stuff just shows up and gets shared without any huge presentation over the years. Recent events like Sonic Month by HP and accompanying write-ups by the VGHF that compliment their releases shows that things are changing and we should get used to that.

I mean, I get the frustration in feeling teased! Believe me. If anything, blame the excitement and enthusiasm once this stuff was found that made Frank share this stuff in advance. Easy mistake to make, but the VGHF probably has a LOT going on behind the scenes besides this one thing and the Sonic 2 stuff never was ready yet for how they wanted to release it.

Fact is, the extra attention to detail with research and making things more of a presentation at release rather than just throwing it online in a random message board topic has actually lead to more former devs and industry people in general getting these things brought to their attention through social media, which in turn has led to more things getting found and released. That can be hard to appreciate, but presentation truly is making a difference these days when it comes to preservation.

It's definitely coming eventually, I'd just chill out and appreciate all the other stuff out there in the meantime.

 

This is definitely the way to go. We should just be patient instead of skipping into conclusions about the VGHF having ulterior motives. Sure, they've paywalled content in this December campaign, but only for 24 hours before making it free for everyone, which is the important part I wanted all of us to focus on when I first brought this topic up.

If you were to check out the VGHF's Patreon or any of their other outlets, you'd realize just how important the work they're doing is. This stuff benefits everyone, and it needs funding to stop private collectors from hoarding these important chapters in gaming history all for themselves, never to see the light of day again. In fact, these highly coordinated group efforts are much better and more efficient at preserving this stuff than the ROM-dumping Robin Hood vigilante types that we've gotten so used to.

If these documents will truly be paywalled for the first 24 hours, I implore anyone who's either impatient enough or eager to support a good cause to pay that price. I know that I will, and I might even share my thoughts and observations on this very thread. Not the actual content itself, though.

And speaking of appreciating all the other stuff out there, we have an another source of Sonic 2 development info in the form of Yamaguchi's Beep21 interviews. Hell, if these documents gain enough traction, they might inspire him to reveal more in the upcoming interviews.

 

24-hours from when?

 

I agree it's good to publicise these events to some degree on the off-chance it'll encourage people to be forthcoming with information, but I'd always favour pointing to a wiki page rather than doing a big write-up or video or whatever, that way you're less susceptible to the the half-life of facts. Also it saves time and effort.

For example, Hidden Palace got this Aladdin prototype wrong and while I posted the correction at the time, the error was picked up by a commercial product and has circulated the globe. That might have been unavoidable - old trade events were still a relative unknown at the time and the prototype kind-of lies, but we were able to correct it on Sega Retro and maybe that'll help longer term.


In Sonic 2's case there are still a lot of unknowns about its development, and we see time and time again people trying to plug the gaps with fan-theories. I've been absorbing this stuff for nearly 20 years and I still wouldn't feel confident in saying "this is how the game was made" - Yasuhara could post something unexpected on Twitter tomorrow and debunk the whole thing. Turns out Sonic 2 was made by aliens, and Sega's policy wasn't to credit extra-terrestrials - who knows.

 

https://x.com/gamehistoryorg/status/1733573566480937170?s=46&t=S0_YkQ8TRA2Bk54XvKgWfw
Youtube link:

Historic preservation work takes a long time. I’m grateful to everyone involved in this project for working to bring us these primary sources. I’m looking forward to learning more Sonic history on tuesday

 

30 years later and this game still has mysteries.

How Sonic 2 came out as good as it did will always be a complete mystery to me. By all accounts it looked like development hell, yet it’s so fun.

 

That's it? That's the lost levels?
THAT WAS JUST A BUNCH OF CHEAP CORKSCREWS!

 

I'm so ready for 3 questions to be answered and 5 dozen more to be found!

(Really though, super excited!)

 

So that video thumbnail is of Hez’s recreations I assume?

 

Yes. It's stated that the tiles are interpretation to fill in the maps. it's inevitable that some may take them as real regardless. Even before these maps came to light. it's the internet.

the raw maps are there too. it's all there. I'm excited to finally be able to openly talk about it all soon.

 

I'm gonna be annoyed if they say "stages", plural, and what they mean is multiple acts of the same stage.

 

Glad to see some of you are excited, but posts like this are why I don't hang out here fyi.

 

Since we've almost definitely been the closest followers of this whole ordeal, the implications of this sentence cannot be understated.

 

It's Sonic 2, so it'd be multiple zones.

...and you call yourself a fan! /s