It seems we're missing context. A better question is "where does this take place?". A good follow-up for additional context would be "what's the plot?", because beyond "world of nightmares", we've never been given an explanation. To me, this looks to be a destination, so what IS this destination? That, along with the plot, might explain why it's "never open" (if that's what it says). Is it never open, because monsters have invaded, scaring everyone away? Is it haunted?
No need to worry on that front - the discoverer is a known community member, who purchased the magazine as part of an initiative to buy up old Japanese gaming magazines featuring coverage of Sonic games and scan them in full. It's 100% going to be scanned in high quality as soon as they get the opportunity to do so.
While stranger things have happened in the past few years, this demo strikes me as the single piece of data we're least likely to find, so any new info we get on it is appreciated.
Agreed. It's still mad to think that the devs actually wanted to publicly release it as part of Sonic Mega Collection all those years ago, only to find that they no longer had a copy of it. What could have been... Hopefully the cart is still out there somewhere - I still keep fingers crossed that the fine folks at Hidden Palace might turn up a lead on its whereabouts some day, assuming it's not been destroyed or succumbed to the dreaded bit-rot...!
Is that a flash/transition for the title screen emblem in top right corner screenshots? Was this known about? Gives me ever so slight vibes of the Sonic Mania title screen forming in...kinda haha
The other nice thing about the screencaps is they show the early Sonic sprite much more clearly. The standard pose is still awkward, but looks a lot better here than it has in prior low res shots. These shots are clean enough to give pixel artists some tools to create very accurate recreations now. I bet an upgraded, simple recreation of the long lost demo would become a lot closer to the real thing if we get enough high res scans of this.
Been seeing some guesses that neglect the previously confirmed letters so I'm just gonna pop this in here for yall. I'm on team NEVER OPEN, as little sense as that makes - though the "O" could so easily be an S. Annoyingly it's only the second letter in the second word making that difference from the more sensical "never seen". That certainly looks like a P and I doubt anything is covering it. That's not an arrow afaik, it's just meant to be a diamond behind the text.
Getting an OCR reading that photo is tricky but I don't think it reveals much in the main body of text. Although they speculate Sonic will attack by rolling into a ball - it doesn't look as if he actually does that in the demo.
This makes me wonder if he had a more elaborate idle animation rather than being completely still and tapping his foot after a few seconds. That would be more in-line with what they were showing off with Castle Of Illusion at the time.
I wanna try and draw attention away from the "never open" thing, and focus to this: ...which surely would be more exciting to talk about! A potentially animated title screen? (Even if it's just mild low fps)
Not that I'm an expert by any means but it seems reasonable to me that a non-native English speaker could innocently mix up the meanings of "seen" and "open" when trying to piece together a memory from 30+ years ago with a blurry screenshot. Both can mean "exposed" or "available" or something along those lines.
I think the last bit is a bit of a reach - I doubt you'd mix up those words based on meaning alone, they're not actually that similar in that regard. More likely is that, when presented with a single screenshot where the words were partially obscured, either he didn't remember and - like the rest of us - just took a best guess based on the letters that were visible, or he simply genuinely misremembered what the sign had said. It was 30 years ago by that point, it's not surprising he wouldn't perfectly recall details from something that was scrapped fairly early into development of the game. For example, in other tweets I'm certain I recall him saying he didn't remember that the goblin enemy had made it into the game in any form until the screenshots showing it resurfaced. EDIT: Went digging and managed to find it again - here's the tweet where Naka states he didn't remember the goblin enemy appearing in the demo.
I just noticed that these new screenshots include a third shot of Sonic in the air above that enemy. I think it shows that Sonic is indeed jumping over them, and in fact, might even show that this was indeed an auto-demo, considering that it's consistent with the other screenshots. With this sequence of images, you can see Sonic moving upwards to the right, while the foreground elements are all moving more and more left. Interestingly, the enemy seems to be staying put, nor does the camera move vertically at all.
Yes, thr rolling nature of the demo becomes more apparent with every new screenshot discovered - especially with this new find, the number of shots we now have that show events seconds, or even frames, after shots from separate sources removes any doubt at this point. For example, the new shots of the enemy jumping upwards, and the cropped one of it having landed and turned around (presumably to face Sonic as he escapes to the right), fit perfectly with two other existing shots we have of the enemy coming down from its jump, both of which were also from separate sources. To be honest, now we know Sonic began from a standing start, assuming his acceleration etc. matched the final game, we could probably actually take a reasonable stab at replicating how fast and how far the enemy's jump arc was based on the screenshots we have available. Still no more light shed on what exactly it's doing in the shots where it's tilting with one foot raised, though - it doesn't appear to move at all while playing that animation between two of the shots where Sonic is jumping over it. Possibly some sort of angry stomp-in-place animation it would play upon seeing Sonic for the first time? Without more shots, or moving footage finally turning up somewhere, it's impossible to tell. There's always another mystery, isn't there...?
