I've been trying to hunt down a batch of pre-release CG cutscenes from Sonic Heroes for a while now. I recall these being either leaked or datamined or something a few months before the game was released, and it included every team's intro (sans Team Sonic, I think), along with part of Team Sonic's post-Albatross scene and Team Dark's ending. The CG itself was finished and the English voices were in place, but none of the sound mixing had been done yet, so there was no music, sound effects, or filters on characters like Metal, Omega, or Eggman's radio (inadvertently spoiling the big twist for Chaotix's story well before release). However, the only one of these I've been able to find so far was the aforementioned Team Sonic scene, seen below. I'm particularly interested in finding Team Dark's ending, as I distinctly recall the dialogue having been changed between then and final release: Whereas in the final, Omega says "You know about cloning. The original must exist somewhere," the unfinished scene rephrases the line as "If he is a copy, then the original must exist somewhere." If anyone knows where I can find these early versions or if they can be found on a specific prototype, it'd be much appreciated.
They seem lost to time at this point, and I was there when all of this was going on. Unless people from CuLT still have them you'll be out of luck since I think it was only in the Heroes forum at the time. I'd really like to have them too since Omega's VA sounded practically the same without the voice filter.
I think at the time I managed to see and hear them. But it's the kind of stuff I rarely keep, usually it's more artwork and such. I hope someone finds them and gets them properly archived.
I think there's a possibility that some of them might be in the 2003-10-08 prototype, since I checked and that one has the unfinished Rose and Chaotix intros, but unless there's an invincibility cheat for that build, I'm not playing all the way through Team Dark's campaign to be sure. The CG movie player on the main menu doesn't work in that build either. Perhaps someone could extract and convert the relevant files? EDIT: Scratch that. Looks like the only scenes with unfinished audio in that build are the aforementioned intros and Metal Sonic's transformation. Can't find 'em in any other protos either. I'm trying to look up old message board posts from that era to figure out where I got 'em from the first time around.
No, it was Mega Collection Plus, and that's not what I'm thinking of. That only had in-production versions of the intro and Team Dark's opening, not any of the others I mentioned. The Gems Collection videos also had unfinished visuals, as opposed to the scenes I'm thinking of.
Here's a link to the original files. A couple months back, I unearthed them during Sam Procrastinate's birthday stream on his YouTube channel. I should probably upload them to YouTube by themselves, so they're out there.
I'll only download this if it has the video with the giant Cult watermark that was made as a shitpost.
Oh wow, it's weird hearing all these cutscenes without any sort of music, sfx, or filters for the voices. Very empty but I like the fact these exist. It's so weird hearing Eggman's voice through the walkie-talkie without any filters (confident that I've heard the Metal Sonic & Omega clip growing up), I assumed he wasn't doing his regular Eggman voice but clearly that's not the case. The old watermark on the corner is charming lmao.
Yep. I remember all of these. Trying to figure out how the hell Shadow was still around and the meaning behind the Dark ending cutscene was wild back in the day.
