Dust Hill and Mystic Cave Discussion 2019

Never, jon burton signed a 90 year NDA preventing that knowledge from ever leaking.

 

It is also good to remember mines are caves inside hills or similar structures.

 

I don't know, I feel like "Panic Puppet" was just Traveler's Tales starting to run out of ideas for alliterative zone names. I mean "Green Grove," "Rusty Ruin," and "Spring Stadium" are all pretty good, "Diamond Dust" and "Volcano Valley" are right at the edge of being overbearing with the theme, and "Gene Gadget" and "Panic Puppet" just scream "Okay what are Eggman-sounding words? 'Gadget' and 'Panic' are good, now how can we turn those into alliterative names to match the theme?" Of course, the fact that Panic Puppet takes place on/around a giant robot - a kind of puppet if you will - helps that name make some sense.

 

It's not like it hasn't happened *COUGH* WACKYWORKBENCH *COUGH* before hehe

 

Nah, Diamond Dust is perfect. One of my favourite names for any of the Ice Zones. Although Cool Edge from Sonic Unleashed beats it just by a fraction, simply for containing the words Cool and Edge.

 

Or Palmtree Panic. It seemed to be a trend with Japanese devs back then. Palmtree Panic, Bomberman: Panic Bomber, Doki Doki Panic, Pac-Panic...

Does anyone know what they thought it meant? Something like frenetic or frenzy, maybe? Palmtree Frenzy, Frenetic Bomber, Heart-pounding Frenzy, Pac-Frenzy...?

 

Maybe the panic puppet was that 10 floor tall robotnik statue that makes up all of zone 2, it's a puppet (at least a simulacrum) that makes you panic (due to it's sheer size)?

Wacky Workbench sounds like a porno movie starring Dick Dastardly & Penelope Pitstop.

 

I still think Dust Hill was a ruined Green Hill just like Oil Ocean is a ruined Ocean Wind. And Mystic Cave and Aquatic Ruins are levels created later on, after the time travel idea was cut. They recycle assets from which would've been used in the zones that didn't get made like Dust Hill and Madness Mountain or Olympus, Tropical Plant and Blue Lake. creating two unnamed zones with the working titles.

Other levels moved around then not bother deleting old name entries, like how Simon Wai has an entry for Genocide City even though it had already been deleted and replaced with Metropolis 3. The Genocide City slot itself happens to be Death Egg in the final build, and what was Death Egg then is actually Sky Chase. I think Dust Hill was the same way. And Zone 01 or 03 were set aside for it in the Nick Arcade days, but they never got around to adding it then. Nick Arcade uses Sonic 1's zone order for demos of the zones they made mockups of; The Green Hills and Hidden Palace. Dust Hill is the only one missing. The Labyrinth Zone coding may have gotten in the way or something so it was made low priority.

Later, while it was still low priority, they expanded the zone order and set space aside for each level. They set Zone 0B aside for Dust Hill next to the only other Now2 level, Oil Ocean, which itself eventually received Zone 03's music. So they named 0B "Dust Hill" and even put it on the level select but then, deadlines become an issue and they start cutting zones and Dust Hill is one of them. Cut before any work was done on it, but after already moving its metadata around a few times. They used the slots they had for it and the other cut zones on the new zones added after time travel was dropped. Sky/Wing Fortress and Sky Chase are tacked on in the level order in the same way as Neo Green Hill/Aquatic Ruin.

Neo Green Hill is a strange one because the name strongly implies time travel yet it seems it was added after time travel was cut. On top of that, its name implies future but the elements came from past levels. Definitely seems intended to be just a working title.

 

I open that link and the first thing I see: