Weird things I find accidentally, episode #853490534 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hoGyKI5J7k This is a German documentary on Sega, from around 1992/1993-ish. There's footage from the Japanese headquarters. Here's Vector the Crocodile wearing a hat and tie. There are other hedgehogs and lizards and things (is it Sister Sonic???). There is development equipment (I think they're building Title Fight). There is pre-rendered Virtua Racing things. That physical Sonic model shows up. There are statistics about the German market.
The description in the video says the video was not released to public ... it was just given to Sega's field , service and trading partners ( it is mentioned in the back of the VHS according to the uploader) ... it's truly a "gem"...
This would've been an awesome find even without the new Sonic bits. Sega promotional aesthetic + 90s eurotechno and Docfuture-worthy Sonic costume mobs, I love it Incredible find though, and great theory! The 1992 date and the Sega CD's prominence (Palmtree Panic tileset at 4:37?) coincides nicely. I guess Sister Sonic was going to be a CoroCoro manga adaptation? The link with Amy is known, but we're also seeing Sonic's dad and Anton here- maybe Sonic's thicc mom was a character in that too, dunno. Discovery of the year, way to beat the clock. Businessman Vector for life.
At about 3:58 someone is sketching Captain Commando - the pseudo-mascot for Capcom. In issue #10 of Mean Machines Sega, there was a claim that a Captain Commando game was in production for the Mega-CD (alongside Forgotten Worlds and "Strider Deluxe"). Since none of these were being reported by anyone else and only Final Fight CD was released, I couldn't prove the project was real. This might do that. The Virtua Racing footage on that widescreen CRT looks like a prototype too - there's a massive speedometer which is reduced to just a number in the final.
This is a pretty amazing find! This is going to be fun to crawl through and investigate, and hopefully someone'll hop on and translate it soon. Only thing I gotta admit is it's aesthetically kind of creepy.. Better not give me nightmares about creepy Sonic costumes while I document stuff in here.
I know a bit of German ... this is what i found ... Sega started a large scale advertisement campaign with the partnership of "Me, Myself and Eye Entertainment" a German television, film, digital production and distribution company , a branch of the All3Media Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All3Media , with the slogan "Wo ist Mein Sega?'' (Where is my Sega)... so.. to promote the Mega Drive they prepared a special event... which involved employees of the Sega Germany marketing team wearing Sonic costumes (more than 50 Sonics) in an airplain trip from Frankfurt to Nuremberg where an exhibition was prepared to show the Mega Drive (and the rest of the goodies) to German public ( starting at minute 6:49)... well... my german is superficial... but that's something... someone with a better understanding of the German language, can do better than me...
What an intriguing video. In addiction to the characters mentioned, there also seem to be prototypes of Mighty and Ray.
Oh my god, those character sheets are incredibly interesting! It's a shame that we can't see Mighty's full head, but at least we can finally see some full-body official artwork of Ray. Why is none of that stuff in the super-fancy artbook that was released not long ago?
I took the liberty of finding freezeframes, and I discovered some very interesting concepts. https://ibb.co/j8WaEw https://ibb.co/mqaP7G https://ibb.co/cUp6Mb https://ibb.co/iJMLgb https://ibb.co/fFnRMb There is alot more, but I wanted to point these out specifically.
If I know any better, I think that Sega at one point planned to Canonize the entirety of the Sonic the Hedgehog Manga (the one in which Nikki is the Clark Kent of Sonic's Superman), but only end up using Emi/Amy Rose and Charmy Bee into their games.
Looking deeper into it, it looks like a lot of these are actually Ohshima's concepts for the characters that appeared in the Sonic Manga. The parents look like those from the manga, as do the lizard characters. Not sure if Vector ever showed up in it? The Manga ones obviously look different due to the different art style, but otherwise are very similar.
On Twitter a few weeks ago, Ohshima did say that Charmy Bee and Amy were characters he created. Kazuyuki Hoshino has said that himself, Ohshima, the manga staff etc all had input on Amy's design. I think in either a Summer of Sonic or Sonic Boom event it was confirmed that Sega of Japan contributed characters and concepts to the manga, so this cements it. I wonder if the Blues Brothers style Vector ever showed up in the manga? I recall Ohshima saying that he wasn't involved in the creation of Mighty or Ray, so we might be looking at multiple artists’ work. It's funny that the Ray concept art has him looking like a cool/tough guy. I like that the final game made him a cute/scardey-cat character instead, for variety.
And here is a short commercial... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEvBau44CRY ... related with the campaign...( in the commercial, a Wizard is desperately trying to find, his "Sega", screaming the slogan "Wo ist Mein Sega?" =Where's my Sega?... in the beginning of the documentary , we can see billboards scattered across the city (on subways, bus stations, train stations, everywhere)... the video, basically documents the success of that campaign and how Sega quickly conquered the market, in Germany leaving Nintendo, in a modest third place... the first half of the video is mainly Sega history ( When it was founded, and all that stuff) and the other half documents how the campaign was orchestrated and successefull... but it's valuable... for having all that precious footage we had never seen (although there's no information about all that good stuff)... the campaign began in 1992 (the narrator mentions that fact in the video)... when people arrived at the exibition, the slogan in the posters and billboards, was changed to "Hier ist deine Sega!"= "Here's your Sega!" ... the good old Sega marketing... I Love you Sega... you deserve my respect...
At 4:05 you can see the digitising equipment being used to create the in-game sprites. Sega used big, presumably bespoke computer things called "Sega Digitizer Systems". They've been seen before - the earliest ones used light pens, these ones are "Model III" units which use tablets. The tablet seen is a "Mitablet-II" and was created by a company called "Graphtec". I can't find much about it, but it... seems more like a glorified computer mouse than a traditional tablet.
What about this https://web.archive.org/web/19980626192304/http://www.graphtec.co.jp:80/ ? ... is in japanese, off course... so i can't do better than you... if it wasen't your tip... i wouldn't get there...so credits go for you... Edit: Oh... i just noticed now that they have an english version... just click the "English Site" button
So what they confirmed is that the Manga was a product of Sega of Japan in the same way that Sonic Boom is a product of Sega of America (or what's left of it); it's not "canon" to the game, but it allow them to import characters to said games with little legal issues. Mind posting some proof?
Regarding that tablet... i discovered this... "the Digitizer consists of a rectangular smooth surface as a draughting board , underneath the surface it has a position-sensing mechanism. The designer interacts through a "Puck" (the mouse). It is an absolute measuring device. It uses , what Graphtec calls , 3-phase electromagnetic induction to determine position. It contains a printed circuit board which is etched with evenly spaced traces on both sides one representing the X axis and the other the Y axis. The "Puck" contains a coil which acts as a receiver or transmiter. In transmitor mode electronic signals in the board can be mesured for their strength, and the highest strength signifies the location of the desired point. The digitizer controller mesures the position of the X axis and the Y axis. The Digitizer is made of two sheets separated by a number of spacer dots. One is deposited with, a resistive film whereas the other is coated with a conductive film. A small voltage is appllied across the resistive film. When pressure is applied by the puck on the Digitizer pad, the potential of the conductive film, will be proporcional to the distance from the end, which gives the locational data. The measurement, is again, done alternatively, in X axis and Y axis... a digitizer communicates with the computer, in single point mode, as the coordinates of the point are transmitted when a button of the "Puck" is pressed. This is used for digitizing discrete points such an already existing drawing. However, when continuous sets of points are required, the "Puck" can be moved continuously, over that line, and the coordinates of the points are sent to the computer at a specified sampling rate, such as 200 coordinate points per second"... 3 Graphtec patents ... https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US4806708.pdf , https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US5414226.pdf, https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US4795858.pdf Edit: Just leaving those 2 pictures of a more recent model of a digitizer manufactured by Graphtec and the respective "Puck" (a cordless "Puck"), for reference... http://auctions.afimg.jp/item_data/image/20140715/yahoo/1/186669123.1.jpg , http://auctions.afimg.jp/item_data/image/20140715/yahoo/1/186669123.2.jpg This information was extracted from the book "CAD/CAM Principles & Applications" (Computer Aided Design/Manufacturing) by Posinasetti Nageswara Rao...
It's a bit blurry, but if you look closely at the image of Nicky on the right, you can see that he's holding a violin. His violin did actually make an appearance in at least one story of the manga: http://pencilhill.tumblr.com/post/86835030568 I saw an auction (that had, unfortunately, already ended) for the July 1992 issue of Shogaku Ninensei (the 2nd grade magazine). It contained a foldout featuring Anton's weird family, seen in the video.