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

Well that’s a slight factual inaccuracy on the stream’s part; Craig Stitt also did Oil Ocean, and Brenda Ross did Wood.

inb4 it turns out all of the assets we associated with WFZ in the final game were GCZ assets.

All of them.

Except possibly the background.

 

I mean, there's a whole lot of electronics and circuitry in the stage...

Do we have any potentially contradicting info on who the WFZ artist was? What about all the other stuff we know about The Machine and Metropolis\B-Bomb assets?

 

Yup my bad on zones, I didn't plan on doing this presentation and I kinda slapped it together literally while the stream was setting up because I wanted to show this off

 

I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet. The *ideas* might have been recycles, but we haven't been able to link a single piece of artwork yet. Everything we have in common between the two still ultimately looks different.

Maybe some of the other scans will clear it up, and if art was in fact repurposed, warrant me having a pie in my face.

 

If I may ask, while you're here... How do you plan to release the large trove of documents you now have? Obviously, this community will have a lot to go over once you do, so it would be nice to know what kind of formats/setup we should reasonably expect given the... complex and confusing history of this game's development.

 

I would say the gimmicks (in some form) and maybe the badniks. I think saying the boss is a bit of a stretch, but who knows. A lot of the level art looks very copy and paste, like someone was running out of time (which they were), so that's where I draw the line.

 

Everything is arranged in folders that maintain original order as he had it in his box, wherever possible, so it's very obvious i.e. what was a notebook and what the page order was. 600dpi RGB colors. Very minimally editorialized for privacy (took out back side of pages with personal info and no game dev stuff). Probably just a zip file on the Internet Archive? I want to throw together some content to benefit our charity first so I can justify the time I spent on the project, but I'm not gonna catch stuff that y'all will and I'm not going to pretend like I can.

 

I'm not saying it isn't possible, but this is pretty easily done replacing the 8x8 tiles only in some of wing fortresses chunks.


EDIT:

Also, turrets? The giant ones?

 

Thanks for answering. That transparency goes a long way with us here, and gives us better incentives to support what has now clearly been your tireless hard work to pull all this off. I just ask that you keep it up and keep us appraised. Some of us have been chasing after these mysteries for 25 years now.

 

This is really very super mind blowing! Thank you very much !!

 

I don't want to get into baseless speculation, but the implications of this would be insane. It would mean there's a possibility that WFZ was not, in fact, made at the last minute, but instead simply mutated from CCZ gradually over time.

 

When looking at all three maps side by side, you really get the impression that this was designed as a true "final zone" that throws all the games toughest challenges at the player, even going so far as to clearly be taking some notes from Scrap Brain Zone (Act 3, in particular with its Labyrinth-like water segments). In comparison to Metropolis Zone, Acts 1 and 2 more specifically, you don't get the impression that the zone was designed as a final zone, and it's clear Act 3 was designed more challenging to compensate for the loss of Genocide City.

The maps also seem to imply a more logical rise in level difficulty compared to the (what we can now assume was hastily put together) Sky Chase and Wing Fortress Zones, which considering how tough people found Metropolis Zone to be, makes one realize this zone was very close to living up its name with how many lives the player would've lost!

It's weird to think there could almost be a timeline where Metropolis Zone was just another 2-act zone, and Genocide City Zone is the more-infamous 3-act gauntlet.

 

There's always been evidence for how rushed WFZ was as well. The broken conveyor, weird slapdash nature of the second half? The stage has a ton of cool looking visual assets though, almost too many for a last second rush job. Hopefully the scans we'll be getting reveal more of the original assets and confirms or denies whether any of them could have been recycled elsewhere beyond what we've already been told. The speculation is fun, but will probably be rendered moot in short order.

Still, if we learn that at least some of those assets were simply repurposed, the whole thing makes a lot more sense the way it ended up. Even the WFZ metal floors/beams seem like they might fit within some of the block chunks we have of Genocide City right now.

And to make all this weirder, it seems like the name "Cyber City" was probably only considered for a short time. Should we even keep using it as the name? Genocide City does seem more appropriate now that we know how... tough... this level looks to be.

 

I figure both names work, I just use Genocide City a bit more out of habit from the SWS2B days. Tomato, tomato. Same zone either way.

 

Eh, I dunno. Many those objects seem better suited for an airship level than GCZ to me. I think it's more likely that things like the Clucker platform were specifically designed for WFZ.

 

No. I don't think there's even the slightest chance that "Genocide City" would ever have been the final name. SEGA of America would never allow the word "genocide" to make it into a freaking Sonic game in 1992. Especially not a word that would be mentioned in so many magazines, strategy guides, and comic books aimed at children.

Today, such a word or concept doesn't seem that bad for a children's game and you might wonder what the big deal is. But in 1992? In a time when video games were still considered toys? No way in hell would that get approved. It would be far too violent and uncomfortable. Consider how after 9/11, "violent" imagery was being censored out of media aimed at children. Now imagine 10 years earlier than that, fresh off the Cold War AND the Gulf War.

 

I think it would be considered much worse today than in 1992. Censorship for children today is ridiculous, unless it’s on the radio in which case, say or sing whatever you like!

 

My little fan theory is that the Japanese team wasn’t liking how a lot of the US stuff was turning out and fairly late decided to axe the zone for a more climactic finish. Then reused some of the concepts in wing fortress zone and metropolis act 3. Act 3 and wing fortress might very well be what they considered the best elements of the acts we are seeing here, but I can’t speak for sure until we get better scans. I wonder if part of the reason the level was cut is it would’ve been too difficult?
Were they uninterested in the theme? If it already had level design made why not finish it instead of redrawing or making new art and a brand new act and level design to replace it? Was there some dislike of the American team? or was it a language barrier issue? Did they just cut the stuff instead of trying to relay changes in a non native language. I just can’t wrap my head around it right now.

 

What about DEZ? Didn't it end up with elements from GCZ, like possibly MPZ3 & WFZ?
Mecha Sonic & Death Egg Robo might've been planned for GCZ2 & GCZ3, respectively.

 

I was thinking that but didn't post. I knew there was a connection.