New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

Oil Ocean is not a desert. It’s literally the ocean, same location as Ocean Wind, but Eggman has polluted it with oil as he rigs the sea floor. Yes, there is a big bright sun with a mirage effect, but that’s it. Just polluted, likely the ozone layer being heavily damaged. The orange sky implies a sunset, and perhaps pollution as well.

Like I said, there is only one desert zone. Rock World is the same location as it, but it was when the climate was colder and had more humidity, hence the snow.

EDIT: as an addendum, when I was a kid I played Sonic and Knuckles before I played Sonic 2. I was checking out the sound test, and as soon as I heard the final OOZ theme, I thought immediately that it was to a desert level like 3K had. When I finally reached OOZ, I was disappointed there was no desert level. I was confused too, I didn’t think it entirely fit: where's the actual desert? Once I started googling it, I discovered this very site back when it was SWS2B. Then I checked out the Wai proto and discovered that OOZ never used that theme.

EDIT 2: The US manual FWIW also says that it's a polluted sea and makes no mention of any deserts. Sure, the Middle East has shores, and they do have a lot of oil rigs too, but nothing about that level as-is regardless of the music is explicitly desert themed or Middle Eastern themed.

The only reason the music changed was to minimize waste and this is the only level it could actually fit in besides Sand Shower.

 

Seems like everyone else they're using Sonic Mania's location as their argument since Mirage Saloon zone is before Oil Ocean. I'm curious if any of the original S2 devs ever mentioned Oil Ocean zone takes place in a desert location

 

Speaking as someone who also sees Oil Ocean as 'the desert zone', no, Mania has nothing to do with it. Please keep your words out of my mouth.

 

Maybe it's just me, but I always saw Oil Ocean's orange sky and ripple effects as signs of pollution and toxic fumes, not heat.

Now I really want to see what Stitt's original background for the Zone looked like. With the sheer amount of Payne's and Ross's contributions that we have access to, it's kind of wild how few early Sonic 2 assets of his have become public over the years. Sure, we got some new Hidden Palace assets in the Segapede prototype, but isn't the general consensus that they were created after Sonic 2?

 

If I recall correctly, he pitched all of his old stuff. I remember him mentioning in a post somewhere that if someone wanted to go digging in a landfill, they might find them. He didn't do it in malace of course. People tend to forget that this was just a job for some and after 3-4 years you sometimes do some spring cleaning.

 

Well speak of the devil.



The VGHF posted this on their Patreon in June. I guess nobody here thought of checking out what they were up to.

 

Damn there's MORE Sonic 2 scrap contents? It's just keep coming out. Looking forward to it

 

What's with the wireframe Tails? They worked on a 3d Tails model back in '92? I wonder what for? The sprites from the 3d special stages were hand-drawn.

Or maybe it was just drawn as a guide for the spriters to get an idea of Tails' dimensions (most likely)?

 

Here's what Google Translate says about the text beneath it.

And yeah, since it's surrounded by drawings of Tails' head from different angles, I'm inclined to believe that it was created for style guide purposes only. They must've had some kind of three-dimensional reference for the corkscrew sprites, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was it.

I wonder when we're getting this material? It took us roughly six months to get Payne's stuff, but that was over 500 documents. If Hez's claims of Stitt having thrown most of his stuff away are indeed true, we're most likely not getting half the amount of material that we got in last December.

I just hope we can be patient and mature about this, unlike the shitshow of entitlement that the wait for Payne's documents turned into.

 

I think he suspected he threw them away, because he's never been able to find the material after a move. Maybe they turned up?!

I've knocked people for that for many years, but I'm not sure that's entirely what was going on the last time.

 

We were JUST talking about him. That's......eerie......

It's astounding all this stuff is unearthing at once. Maybe the developers took some interest once they realised how many fans were intrigued by their work.

Which zones did Stitt work on besides Hidden Palace specifically?

 

Metropolis was the other big one Stitt did. And if I'm not mistaken, he also did Oil Ocean.

 

Metropolis was done by Tom Payne, same as Genocide City, which shared some of its assets. However, I'm pretty sure that Yamaguchi mistakenly attributes it to Stitt in his second Beep21 interview.

Honestly, the more I look at those interviews, the more convinced I am that he doesn't remember all that much from his time working on the game. Hell, many of his statements from them are pretty much just word-for-word quotations from either our wiki or Sonic Wiki Zone, except translated to Japanese of course.

 

Here's the fan recreation I was talking about earlier:



It interprets the moving spike thing from GCZ Act 1 as a boss using graphics from the Red Eye (I wonder if this is where Frank got his username here) mini-boss from Sonic & Knuckles. Not sure if I 100% agree with this interpretation, but it's an understandable one nonetheless.

I really like this interpretation of GCZ in general. It features much more of the Zone's intended gimmicks than other recreations, even being the only one to implement the gravity-reversing fans correctly. I like the background too, even though it's mostly just recolored Metallic Madness assets.

I recommend any regular of this thread to check this project out, it's not only a fangame, but also a full reimagining of the soundtrack in a style reminiscent of Sonic CD's JP/EU soundtrack. Ocean Wind Act 1 and Metropolis Act 2 are especially bangers.

 

That is exactly how I figured those floors worked. I dig it.

 

I still think that room looks a lot more like that left/right antigravity bouncer room in S3&K’s DEZ, but this basically looks like DEZ in general when you add all those floors.

 

That interpretation much more closely matches what I expected. It actually explains the fan placements too and how they work.

 

I'm not sure if this has been pointed out but the unused Spinball map seems to reuse tiles from the Sand Shower mockup:



Now if I rearrange the bottom row the right way up, we seem to get the finished version of the interior bridge:



That's three unused levels with art recycled. I am seriously wondering if anything of Wood Zone got into Spinball.

EDIT: Well what do you know, there IS, sort of.

On the same unused map the vine art over the platforms is the same pattern as that on some of the log work in Wood.

 

It was known that some of the pillars were taken from Sand Shower, but these are new discoveries as far as I know.

Also, the Underground Caves wiki page could really do with some updating. It doesn't have any images, like these mockups or the early level order list which reveals its name. The actual level map should be put there too, but referencing its source might prove difficult, as it was only uploaded to a private Facebook group. EDIT: The map was for Toxic Pools, not Underground Caves. Nonetheless, Stitt's quotes regarding the map, which very much included details on Underground Caves too, still originate from a private Facebook group.

 

I guess I had just assumed it was caught. If its also not known, there's another picture in that reel too of an unknown level (I am assuming it isn't sonic related) that use almost all Sand Shower tiles.



Which incorporate the larger pillars. I'm almost positive these pillars were used in Sand Shower.

EDIT: This is my pixel recreation. I can't find the real one at the moment but its basically the same.


I've also put them in a mock layout I've been working on to best fit Sonic 2's style. A lot of hacks seem to put a layout in that stick out like a sore thumb. It seems fairly obvious with the tiles alone that this was repurposed heavily into Sandopolis. I'm willing to bet either Death Egg or Launch Base is what Genocide became.

https://imgur.com/a/Lw6T5hh
If anyone wants to use these feel free. They're not optimized yet to fit into a Sonic 2 game though so I'm working on that.

EDIT2: I wanted to put recreation and mock in bold, as I've gotten a few messages.