(DC) Sonic Adventure 2 Pre-Release (2001-05-03)

I think any references to the "light and dark" thing were most likely a nod to the fact that there's a DARK SONIC. Exactly the same sort of noise you see with Metroid Prime 2 or Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

The concept seemed to be applied to the rest of the cast without much thought. Rouge for example isn't much of a "dark" character - she's the Wario of Sonic games... except terrible.

 

Are there sources for all that?

 

But this is one of those things that I feel like is really similar to Ohshima being asked if Sonic CD was related to Sonic 2 and he said "No," despite the fact there are too many connections between the two games to ignore. It's possible he misunderstood the question and/or the translator simplified/misunderstood his response. Otherwise it's something that creates more questions than it answers.

While I will admit the branching path system could probably be considered speculation (even though it came from the Official Dreamcast Magazine), I am absolutely positive that Tails, Shadow and Rouge were not playable characters originally. There was entirely too much uproar over Tails being missing - it was an issue that went on for months, and there is a very clear point where you can see that something about the game changed. Tails is the key to that, because you can't just add a character like that to the roster without juggling a lot of other things around, and that goes a long way to explaining so much about why SA2 is the way it is.

I don't consider Knuckles to be a hero character at all, incidentally. He was framed as "Sonic's Friendly Nemesis" in the comics for the longest time, and as of SA1 he and Sonic still bickered. In SA2, he's willing to crash the Space Shuttle because he cares more about the Master Emerald than what happens to anyone else. Sonic is your typical hero, but Knuckles fights for personal goals, and if that happens to align with what Sonic's doing, then so be it.

That's why I figure the theme of light and dark more than likely played out like

Sonic = Light. The Hero who wants to save the world.
Knuckles = Neutral. Has been on both sides of the moral compass, though mainly due to gullibility. But not always.
Eggman = Dark. Wants to rule the world at all costs.

 

You can see his response here at 1:38:00. Iizuka double checks the questions so its unlikely that he misunderstood. There was never a branching path system. It was just speculation gone wild.

No one seems to have a copy of this magazine. It's supposed to come from the UK, but I have every issue of the official UK magazine and its not mentioned once.

If you look at this original tralier for SA2, there's a whole bunch of big features they don't show, such as GUN (the truck has no GUN branding), Dark and Hero Chao, 2P mode and other things, so it's clear that they were keeping certain aspects of the game secret. I think Tails, Rouge and Shadow were also an example of keeping things secret.

Plus, if the uproar was just about Tails, why go to the trouble of making Shadow playable and adding a new character in the form of Rouge. Why not just add Tails and have him race Sonic like he did in SA1?

Yeah, it's possible they were late additons. But it seems unlikely and there isn't a shred of evidence to support it. There is plenty of evidence to show that they were keen on keeping things secret, which is why I am inclined to belive that Shadow/Tails/Rouge were just an example of this.

 

That is the worst trailer for a video game I have ever seen.

 

What's funny about it is that I see trailers like this all the time for upcoming indie games. xD A lot of indies don't bother to wait until they have more content and feel like they need to demonstrate right away what their game can do, kindof. I think Sonic gets away with it purely because of his popularity. (Case in point: The earliest teasers for Sonic 4 Episode II.)

 

Time constraints. Shadow and Rouge were always part of the story - they didn't make Rouge up just for the sake of making her be Knuckles' rival. Some of the earliest info we got about the game was from that Gamestop Investors Summit or whatever, where somebody there described to us a bunch of (still never-before-seen) concept art, of all kinds of wild stuff like "Nails the Bat", various versions of "Dark Sonic" (missing eyes, missing arms, covered in scars), a monster made out of thousands of eyeballs, and so on.

(By the way, the Wiki talk page you cite is actually me telling somebody else about this information all the way back in 2005, shortly after Shadow the Hedgehog came out, if you didn't notice. A year or two after writing that response on the Wiki Talk page, I actually tracked all of this stuff down in the SonicHQ news archives via the Wayback Machine, so it's probably fresher in my mind now than it was then)

The point is, they were always part of the game. So if they were part of the game and weren't playable, then what were they? That's what we don't know - but you could assume that they were more than likely just regular old boss encounters.

When they added Tails, they didn't add anything "new" in terms of gameplay content. It was a quick, relatively easy way to retool the game - they took what they already had, and doubled it. Clones of existing characters, clones of existing levels. It's important to note that characters don't actually revisit existing levels, either, so your idea of Tails racing Sonic doesn't hold much water. It's not as though Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Eggman all visit Iron Gate at some point in the adventure.

Keep in mind that the good/evil theme was in the game from very early on, too. So it also doesn't make much sense for there to be a gametype of Tails vs. Sonic, either. Adding Tails in and upgrading Shadow and Rouge to playable characters does, however, keep the good/evil theme while retaining a simple way to add more content without having to come up with significantly new gameplay types.

Yes, they were keeping secrets, but that's also part of the problem, because there's a significant blank spot that is the development of this game, and a lot of the actual mostly-verified information (re: that concept art we've never seen) sounds crazy in a way that the game we got was not. Some weird stuff did happen behind the scenes of this game, and until we actually get somebody to straighten everything out, what you're saying is just as possible as what I'm saying, as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: And I also forgot that the Tails incident was brought up post-SA2 by Sonic Team, as well - interviews for Sonic Heroes had either Iizuka or Naka defending the game's large roster of characters, to which they answered something like "If we don't include fan-favorites, we end up getting a lot of nasty letters wondering where they are."

 

I don't think the playable Tails was added late in development... It wouldn't make much sense from a development standpoint, since his player indexes are lower than Robotnik's:

Going by it, the mechs might have been the last playable characters to be implemented before the unknown Amy, the Super forms and the 2-Player alternate characters.

 

Is what we have here the earliest known playable version of the game released to the public? Where was the game first seen in a playable state?

 

Those indexs also suggest that Playable Shadow and Rouge were added well before Mech Eggaman. Which makes it even less likely that Tails/Rouge/Shadow were made playable as a result of an outcry to the lack of Tails.

Do you have any links for this stuff. It sounds fascinating, and I would love to see it. (I know the concept art isn't available but I would love to see links to the articles that originally reference it).

Do you have a link for the interview? The only interview I can recall which matches what you are talking about is this one, which makes no reference to the "Tails incident".

I do agree it is possible that Tails/Shadow/Rouge were late additions. However, I think it is very unlikely. The sole source of evidence for this theory is the fact that Tails doesn't appear in the intial promotional material, which is kind of weak (If he was only going to be NPC, then why did they hide him in the inital reveal?).

SA2 suffers from a lot of misinformation. It's hard to find an article about the games' development which doesn't make reference to the submarine, the branching story, the 3 character roster or Sega needing money from Soap to finish the game. Yet there isn't any evidence for any of these claims which are all fairly outlandish (and, indeed, the submarine/branching story has shown to be false).

 

While the internet never necessarily forgets, it does make it really really hard to track down this kind of stuff, especially when we're talking 12 or 13 years ago. It probably wouldn't be impossible to track it down, but it would take hours. Unfortunately, I have more pressing matters to attend to at the moment.

 

Funny you should mention that because SA2's re-release had a similarly underwhelming reveal trailer at Boom 2012.

Underwhelming trailers for an underwhelming game. :v: But in both cases, they literally had little to nothing to show of the game and were done quickly to build early hype.

 

Could it be possible that one of these Amys is used for Cutscenes only? I mean, it's a long shot and I honestly don't know much about how the SA2 engine works. There's also the possibility of it just being filler data though.

 

The cutscenes don't even use character IDs (although they could have at one point if it was based on SA1), and the ID Amy uses in the final is 8, rather than 11 with all the rest of the 2P chars.

 

I distinctly remember the "Tails might not be in Sonic Adventure 2" point well before reading this stuff again on the internet, and I'm almost positive I would have read that in the UK's Official Dreamcast Magazine.

Scans would be useful but to be honest, we really need a way of organising scans of entire magazines, not just select pages. This stuff is far too useful, not just for Sonic Retro, but for every online project where the aim is to document video games.

 

I think people don't get too worked up over Sonic Adventure 2's development because aside from some rumors like the no Tails and branching paths stuff, it seems like it was pretty straightforward. They had a pretty clear goal in mind, they implemented it, and then they slapped some SOAP shoes on Sonic to help fund the project.

At the very least I don't see much evidence to the contrary. That's not to say there isn't going to be some cool stuff to be found but I doubt there's going to be anything majorly different from the final product like with past games, if that makes sense.

 

Thanks for posting all those scans, David The Lurker!
It's great to see a source for all those things, especially the submarine.

Here are the scans from Official Dreamcast Magazine:
Scan 1
Scan 2 - December 2000

They do make the claim that Sonic, Knuckles and Eggman are the only characters (although the don't specify playable), which gives more weight to Blaze's theory.

Thanks again for the post!

 

Full size doesn't work for me.