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

Hats off to Cifaldi for sharing these. It's awesome for things like this to get brought to light, I hope we can see more someday.

 

Does that guy just hang out in hpz discord?

 

I've seen those many times, but until now, I never once realized that about half of the chunks there match Metropolis Zone. I think it's pretty hard to dispute. It's pretty stunning to me how well many of them match. I guess I'm late to the party in that respect =P

EDIT: Just added clarification: I knew it became Metropolis 3, I just never knew it shared resources. I always assumed some kind of retro-fit occurred. But it makes sense.

 

The cool thing about this is a dedicated enough set of hackers could attempt to build a 1 act stage based on all of these assets and design docs. They're detailed enough to tell us the building blocks that would go into making a level, right down to resolution and pixel size for each art asset. Hopefully these get scanned soon and give a dedicated team the resources needed to make an even more authentic interpretation, though I quite like the Secret Zones hack myself.

 

This is one of the most incredible discoveries related to Sonic 2 that I've seen since the original Simon Wai beta. With this, you could reverse engineer block definitions and even primitive tiles. Combine this with Metropolis Zone's level layout, and that would be about as close to Genocide City as we'd ever get.

 

An incredibly similar palette can be found in B-BOMB'S Tech World files

 

I like the fact that now we have most of data for Genocide city, but still discuss about Desert level name XD

It's seems so nice, and I wonder, how much we hasn't saw. It's reminds me HPZ that was deleted before realese, and seems like Genocide city was made in proto builds, at least partially (At least objects. But would be funny to find in game chunks)

 

I think the biggest argument against is that the assets Tom showed us were 24 by 24 blocks, while Sonic 2's are 16 by 16. Secret Zones had to edit the art to work properly.

It's possible it was based off of Cyber City's art, same for The Machine, but that itself is a very indefinite area, since it can be anywhere from Segapede practically ripping all of Hidden Palace's art to Toxic Caves....using a bit of background heavily modified.

I am super excited by this discovery either way, we are getting closer and closer to finally figuring out what the hell Cyber City actually looked like.

 

Two things:

It looks like we might have either block numbers or VRAM tile numbers. It'd be nice to know which Metropolis blocks/tiles would get overwritten by these fans.

The other thing is I see what either looks like either chunk design or level design drawn on two sheets on the bottom of the heap. Are those from Cyber City too, or are they merely incidental? An analysis should be done on those.

Of course if I had more time, I'd do the research myself. Maybe someone wants to volunteer?

 

Hum.. it's really seems like level layout in right side and on left side.
I see the concept of layout with many chunks, like things that we have on wiki:

Spoiler: Image

 

I'm curious to what those to two "Rhomb" rectangles are for.

 

early versions of Metropolis zone had these ... "rhombus" ... things that would move back and forth that you'd have to navigate.

...wait a second, they were even exclusive to act 3, which Cyber City Zone was originally supposed to be.

 

Good point, though weird none of them are rhombus shaped. Are they really doing it piece by piece?

Actually something I'm kicking myself for noting before:



It looks like some of the concept art was already telling us what art from MTZ was gonna get overwritten with Cyber City assets.

I'm also wondering if this unused art (which is not the same as the MTZ beta lift) is from the same concept papers:

 

It's so odd that this was scrapped, name aside. Did they just not like the stage art? Was it a remnant of the time travel mechanic that was thrown out later than the other elements? (Cyber City seems to be a more advanced "Future" version of Metropolis essentially, replacing mechanical machinery elements with computerized circuitry). The Genocide city name was just bad engrish for how "dangerous" this future deadly mechanized city could be.

Then of course, when the time travel concept was thrown out entirely, it was easier to just convert the 1 off stage into Metropolis Act 3.

 

I dunno really. It feels a bit like Hidden Palace in a lot of regards in that they had most of the stuff already made but it got hold off so long during the run that they just canned it.

I remember some claim that they didn't have enough room for the levels or something. Dunno if that holds keeping in mind cartridge/hardware difference with all the ROM expansions.

 

I just double checked, and surely enough, Genocide City occupies roughly the same area as Metropolis in the Present map from the early design phase:



So aside from the time limitations of building a 1 act stage with new graphics and gimmicks (vs just doing an Act 3 of an existing stage), it was closely tied to the old time travel mechanic, which was scrapped entirely.

Although the listing of "Zone 1" and "Zone 2" somewhat contradicts the old "One Act" narrative, but my guess was that too changed partway into development before the zone was fully scrapped.

 

Good point, but it's entirely possible that the art was modified to fit the 24x24 structure of B-Bomb.

Imagine taking all that we have now and reconstructing Cyber City using the Wai layout of MTZ 3, that'd be a cool little hack.

 

There's also a precedent for this. Remember Craig Stitt's re-usage of redrawn Hidden Palace assets in Astropede. If developers are telling us they recycled Genocide City assets, we should believe them. They can be altered, but still come from the same concept art.


Also, just for convenience sake, here's links to 2 full map layouts for The Machine, both the 16 and 8 bit versions. We should take a closer look at it once we have the full scans from these documents, and see if there are any elements that are more definitively recognizable.

 

I just chuckled at the realisation we're just casually throwing around the name Genocide City.

Also chuckled at the fact that Genocide City 2 Zone was a thing, like we couldn't get enough of the first one.

 

Genocide City 2 Zone: Genocide Harder.