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

I mean, the Chemical Plant one is possibly a mockup - the way Sonic & Tails are pefectly in sync on the different paths would be difficult to replicate intentionally in-game, and the camera is perfectly centered between them which just straight up isn't how it functions in builds earlier or later than the shot in question. However, it's definitely not the same as the early Emerald Hill/Hidden Palace/Sand Shower set, as it seems to use a recognisable section of the actual stage layout, and the green buildings in the background show that it must have been produced after the stage was already implemented in-game.

It could be that they made a mockup screen for marketing purposes to help showcase the cooperative play aspect of the game. Either that or, if it is a genuine gameplay screenshot, some sort of debug camera function must have been used, though if that's the case I'd imagine there'd be evidence of such a function existing in one of the builds we already have. Can any tech-savvy members shed any light on whether such a function may exist?

Whatever the image's origin, it must have been created at some point between the Nick Arcade and Simon Wai builds development-wise - while it uses the final colour palette, the way the pipes connect to the circular elements still matches the Nick Arcade version, rather than the style seen from the Simon Wai build onwards.

From memory, there's at least one more image which exhibits these same oddities - a shot of an early section of Emerald Hill Zone Act 2 where, again, Sonic and Tails are in a recognisable area of the actual stage layout, but are separated across the upper and lower routes of the section with the camera centered between them vertically. As these two images are the only ones I can think of which exhibit these elements, I wonder if they were both produced as a set at the same point in time?

 

As I remember, someone somewhere once approved that it possible with some Tails ai modifications, or smth

 

I am relatively sure these are all in-engine shots, just with some camera modifications (basically +n to camera's y coordinate). Mockups are usually painfully obvious to detect.

They're carefully crafted to look pretty, but they're all fully possible to achieve (although I hadn't spotted the pre-Wai CPZ chunks, so I guess not pixel perfectly in our current builds).

 

The HTZ one doesn't appear to be a mockup, just a shot of the see-saw in action. Sonic's placement looks a tad odd at a glance but I'm fairly certain whoevers playing just had him on the edge of the collision and caught the screen mere frames into the launch.

 

It's entirely possible they had someone else using the 2P controller and had the camera automatically center between the two of them similar to Chaotix. If there's no trace of any such code (manual or automatic), perhaps they cleanly removed it.

 

Yes, this one's perfectly easy to recreate in-game, and is almost certainly a genuine screenshot. For one, I doubt they'd mock up Sonic hugging the wall like that as he flew off the see-saw, especially as it means half the screen ends up showing nothing but a solid wall! In an early mockup for the stage, I'd also probably expect to see the green ball object that occupied the see-saw in the Nick Arcade build, rather than the flashing enemy used from Simon Wai build onwards.

 

That's not the screen I was talking about. There is a screenshot or mockup in a preview of Sega Visions that shows the Nick Arcade version of that seesaw.

 

So we've been under the assumption that Chemical Plant had no concept art made for it, right? Because what I'm about to show you is proof of the opposite... kind of.



Here's the future island. A keen eye might notice that pretty much all of the buildings are identical; That ziggurat-esque building appears five times on this map, and all of them are surrounded by the exact same assortment of towers, antennae and turrets. It appears that all structures on this map are just copypasted from the exact same structure, except for the roads and...



It's the only spot on the map to be different, and the "Chemical Plant Zone" -label is on top of it in the future map with zone names.

 

You can try to find it: Sega Visions

 

This is a little off-topic, but does anybody else find Genocide City's name being blurred out a little funny? It makes it look NSFW.

 

I eventually did find it on Retro itself. While this does seem to come from Nick Arcade, it is not a mockup.

 

A point that was made to me last month was how "genocide" is a sensitive word in Japan. I think it's absurd to blur it out, but then I didn't publish it.

 

I think it's more of a precautionary measure. Seems silly to anyone who has context of the situation but could easily be misconstrued out of context.

 

I've spent hours going through the prototypes, and I have never seen anything like this in any build. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, though.

 

It could be a mockup. But let's say it's not for a moment... then it is, at a bare-minimum, "staged". But then, that's the point of mockups, is to show something specific by moving objects into place.

So at the end of the day, while technically different, there is absolutely a great deal of overlap here, and we waste time trying to separate them apart. Mockup or not, the graphics either way were clearly started. You might have something of a map, but it could be 100% complete, or it could be a measly 5%.

The original point as I understand it was this: if you have the picture at all, then the construction of that level has begun. Is there something else to it that I'm missing?

 

Was there ever verification, like with an interview or something, that the Japanese Sonic Team members wanted an english word that meant high level disaster or world ending event and picked "Genocide" but not knowing what it specifically meant at the time, and when they found out they changed it to something else? They used "The Doomsday Zone" for the final zone in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which is a more safe version of the same naming idea that they actually wanted.

Other names I thought up that could work here:
True Revelation Zone
Final Destruction Zone
Ragnarok Rift Zone
Apocalypse Arena Zone
Supernova Silence Zone
Extinction Event Zone

The above names include myths, scientific terms of prehistoric and space level events that we will never realistically see in our lifetimes, and generic naming schemes to get the point across that are safe to use. Natural world halting disasters. Halting is also an important word, as such scientific events may have killed 95% of all life on earth and would take millions of years to recover but eventually the earth recovered. Multiple times. We also know the sun will eventually die, growing into a red giant and swallowing the earth, vaporizing it. Humanity would either be long dead before that happens, or colonizing other younger safer solar systems. That or whatever dominant species on earth comes after us.

Names that would have been questionable in the 90s but ABSOLUTELY wouldn't fly in today's world:
Genocide City Zone
Ground Zero Zone

Genocide means "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." It is different because it is a large group of people intentionally murdering another entire minority group after dehumanizing them. It has no place in modern society, yet it has indeed 100% happened in the past, the present, and unfortunately will happen again the future. I will NOT give specific examples because that is not what this forum is for. But that very taboo reason is why "Genocide City Zone" got blurred out. Referencing real disasters that happened in our lifetime or our grandparents lifetimes, especially ones intentionally caused by humans to hurt other humans and cause pain and suffering has no place in the "gotta go fast hedgehog game."

Even the basic idea of combining "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "generic genocide" would be way too real for today's audiences in the current political climate. Like a story where Dr. Ivo Robotnik becomes leader of the "Sonic World" humans and convinces everyone after months of hateful propaganda to exterminate the "vermin" that is all the anthro animal people characters would leave a bad taste in real world everyone's mouth. I am not sure if video game canon Eggman even killed people. He just liked to put lesser animals into robots as batteries, which is cruel but not kill them. Send a giant monster rampaging into the city? Eggman is covered by the Godzilla rule where it is so fantastical it would never realistically happen. He would shoot a laser at the earth to spit it into pieces that should still kill everyone but it doesn't somehow just to get the monster of the week inside. Not even sure about Forces, still in the dark on the details if I ever want to track down a copy of the game and go in blind, can someone tell me if it was mention that he killed anything there? Even 90s western Robotnik at his worst would turn his enemies into robotized robot slaves, essentially "killing them" but there is always that get out of jail free card where it could be reversed for plot reasons so they are not actually dead you know?

So yeah in hindsight we as a community should leave Genocide City behind. Even as a kid and reading about the lost sonic zone "Genocide City" was where I first heard the word Genocide and associated it with the zone without knowing its deeper meaning besides "Everything Dies and Robotnik caused it." I know it is a hard pill to swallow. "Cyber City" is here to stay.

 

Respectfully, I'm not going to address 95% of this with a ten-foot pole. I'm confused why you went into all of that. Of course the word "Genocide" is inappropriate for a Sonic the Hedgehog game.

That said, it's a word. Words don't hurt people, people hurt people. It's not even a rude word. Thus why it's bizarre to me they blurred it out. But again, it's apparently a controversial thing over in Japan. So their culture lends itself more to it being censored. It is what it is. I'd be outraged if western media did this same thing, but Japan is obviously their own flavor.

But we all know what it is anyway, so in the end, it doesn't matter too much.

 

Jokes aside, I'm curious how many floppy disks contain a goldmine out there. It's insane we've all likely had Sand Shower tiles on our machines for years. It makes me wonder what else we have that we don't even know.

 

I think the censoring had more to do with not wanting to give the impression that SEGA (or more likely, Yamaguchi himself) deliberately chose that name and knew fully well what it meant. I think the devs just thought the word meant "mass death and destruction" and didn't know it specifically was associated with hate against minorities. Obviously had the zone been released with the game, they would've changed the name. But demonizing the fanbase for continuing to say "Genocide" is just odd. It's not a slur.

https://info.sonicretro.org/Tom_Payne_interview_by_SageXPO_(July_30,_2009)

 

Just took a look at that interview.

Perhaps we were wrong about the concept art after all?