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

The tall "elevator" areas combined with the Metropolis Zone music, the conveyor belts, and even the similar color scheme of bronze/brown with green feel like too much for me to call coincidence. I mean, it could still be, but if so that's a lot of coincidences.

A part of me wants to see the two zones fused together. I've always thought of the stage starting off as Wood Zone and then progressively morphing until it's fully Metropolis by Act 3. Kinda like if the Knothole / Robotropolis idea from the DiC cartoons had something of substance to back it up. Bit of fan fiction, I know, but that's always been a fun idea to me.

 

The sadly shitcanned Mania Misfits Pack mod had a Metropolis/Wood fusion that looked like it was shaping up fabulously. Shame about that.

 

sorry about that

 

No apology needed, that's just the way she goes. I've never accomplished anything of palpable worth in all my time here in the community but it's not for lack of trying, I know how hard it is. At least y'all were able to get as far as you did and hopefully it pays off down the road.

 

Honestly, if I had to guess by all the evidence.

Death Egg Zones music was Genocide Citys. Why? Both the unused and the used Machine music have that weird vibe to it. That, eerie vibe. I'll die on this hill.
Wing Fortress was intended for Death Egg. It makes too much sense with where it was in the prototypes, along with whoever made the point it had similar melodies to Star Wars. It’s REALLY hard to get my mind to accept this due to how familiar I am with how it was growing up, but the evidence really points that direction.

Sky Chase and Wing Fortress didn’t exist, so they needed no music for this to all work.

Side note – I think the two player results may have been a level music at one point. It’s stretching it, but it’s a full length song opposed to a small jingle like most menu songs are. It could have been one of the Blue Ocean songs or something.


As far as bosses go. I think they were all repurposed. If I had to bet, I’d say the Wing Fortress boss was intended for Genocide City. Why? It’s a giant laser. The zone had a smaller laser gimmick. It seems to match up along with what now looks like a cut scene.

The Silver Sonic boss was meant for Death egg Act 2. I think there was some sort of second cutscene (or not, heck who knows) where you went further up into “space” and fought the Death Egg robot. This would be sonic 2’s “Final Zone”.

Even wilder theory. Death Egg Zone was meant to have stand-alone graphics and were repurposed for Wing Fortress. The “Final” zone would have been what we ended up with. The Death Egg we see isn’t truly Death Egg, but the Final Zone. Death Egg is essentially scrapped with an imposter level keeping its name and stealing an extra boss because it’s greedy.

This all obviously didn’t pan out, but that is my tin foil hat two cents.

 

Allow me to add my own tin foil hat to the pile, I agree that Wing Fortress was probably for the Original version of Death Egg. My reasoning is, the final boss theme (Death Egg Part 2 in the demo tracklist) has very similar percussion to Wing Fortress' demo. Very orchestral. The percussion is only accenting certain hits which is unlike most of the other tracks on the demo which use more traditional percussion grooves. As a particular example, the kick (or timpani? Not sure exactly) on both tracks is very similar, both almost only appearing in quick bursts and both have a quick march style bom-bom-bom hit to them.

It could just be the style he was going for thus a coincidence, but regardless.

Mind you this is probably a bit far fetched as a potential connection but I could very well see that being the case.

 

That does make sense, though still the concept maps seem to point to it being for Casino Night. Metropolis IS in the same time era map in fact, though not next to Wood Zone (Sand Shower seems to be the transition between them).

I admit Wood Zone feels like a bit of missed potential because of that, though at least Mushroom Hill goes back to it a little. A lush forest that Eggman's technology is ripping up.

Really if we go by the beta rendition of two player implying it was gonna be co-op rather than races at one point, that might very well be true.

 

Also I should say, the conveyer belts in Wood Zone kinda struck me as something more similar to the printing belts in Press Garden. Something a little more basic used for transporting materials around rather than mass production. Also, Casino Night and Wing Fortress also have conveyer belt gimmicks, so it's not like Wood > Metropolis is the only connection.

 

I can't get my head completely around the DEZ music fitting Cyber City. The disorienting synth arpeggiations, confusing rhythm, the "Blow Me Man Down" esque main melody, and the almost delirious ending give the implications of nausea. Like the song is swirling around you.

It doesn't make much sense why a factory would give that vibe, but it makes a lot more sense when juxtaposed against the stars, being placed dizzyingly high above the earth. It really captures the vertigo you'd get from traveling all the way from some low hills to outer space.

The tension and dissonance in the track also has a lot more of a haunting finality to it than any other song in the OST, which makes it also feel more apt for a final zone. I dunno.

 

Has anyone noticed that the final Mystic Cave music has that carnival-esque cliché motif? I forget the name. Really fits with that description of the level as originally having some haunted element (if I recall the quotation).

 

Just a note on this - I'm pretty sure Yamaguchi already confirmed Mecha Sonic was intended as a mid-boss for the stage, which would more likely place it at the end of Act 1 if the stage was the standard two Acts. It was in the same series of tweets where he described the more ambitious original plans for the boss, such as opening up its chest hatch to perform a ring-stealing gravity ball attack.

From memory, the tweets also implied that the final version of Death Egg just used the bosses planned for the stage, albeit simplified in Mecha Sonic's case due to time constraints. So if I'm remembering that correctly, that'd imply the Death Egg Robot was also intended for the original version of the stage, presumably as the 'proper' boss at the end of Act 2.

Anyone able to dig up a link to the tweets in question? I'm only going from memory here, don't want to muddy the waters with anything misremembered.

 

Here: https://twitter.com/judy_totoya/status/1594694031396999168?t=8X0nyr_hGIbKRNYgyhZYlw&s=19

 

I can't offer much to this conversation, but I have what is probably a better translation rather than Google's. (Sourced from ChatGPT)

 

Thanks for breaking it all down with translations - much appreciated. Great to see I wasn't misremembering re: Mecha Sonic being intended as Death Egg's mid-boss - the description of facing it 'in the middle of the Zone' seems pretty clear it was intended to be placed at the end of Act 1 of the Zone as originally planned.

Reading it back, there's one other thing I recall from reading that thread first time around. As mentioned in the second-to-last tweet in your post, when drawing his new anniversary Mecha Sonic illustration Yamaguchi thought about where to put the extra blades fired out when Mecha Sonic spin jumps (which hadn't been part of the original design), and decided they could slot in either side of the head. However, looking at his "final" Mecha Sonic lineart from Sonic 2 you can see he'd already had the same thought 30 years previously, as the extra blades are located in the exact same spot! It's fun not only to see how much thought he put into it, but also that despite forgetting that he'd figured the issue out previously, he still ended up drawing the same conclusion as to how they would actually function and where they should be located.

Incidentally, the earlier design sketches of Mecha Sonic show he's definitely remembering correctly re: the attack being added after the fact, as those do indeed lack the extra blades.

 

Do we know that DEZ was meant to be two full acts? Like, two full levels? I always thought it was meant to be one act, with Mecha Sonic as a boss, and then the second "act" was merely the final boss. Kinda like how in Sonic 1, Final Zone is really just SBZ Act 3 (while "SBZ Act 3" is actually LZ Act 4).

Also this thread was meant for discussing the Genocide City Zone findings, but it's quickly become a second general Sonic 2 lore thread. There's gotta be a better way to keep the two separate.

 

If the level selects are to be used as a guide, it was probably viewed originally as a two-act zone, then became a one-act zone later when they were putting [Sky] Fortress and Sky Chase in.

Otherwise, I don't recall any indication one way or the other.

 

Unfortunately there's no evidence from these tweets to support answering this question:

We would need to instead ask ourselves this: Would it make sense to fill out an entire Act of a level, lock sonic in one spot for a mid-act boss (forcing all level geometry paths to converge into the same spot), and then split off into more level paths to explore before facing the Death Egg Robot? This Zone could've been big, or it could've been small. Maybe it would've just been a series of tubes or something Sonic would travel through after Mecha Sonic before hitting a checkpoint to then face the Death Egg Robot. (I mean, they did end up using Chemical Plants Tiles, so its an idea)

I feel like at this point we might want to start compiling a Google Doc Sheet of all the questions we want to ask that will get us the most answers and present it as a "Community to Dev Interview". Heck maybe if we come together and put some real elbow grease into it to make it look nice, this can be a Quarterly or Yearly thing we can end up offering to the Devs: Curated Questions from the Sonic Community! (With some nice emblem or something to show we're not just gonna fire off questions at random but REALLY THINK about what we wanna know)

I would offer this as the question "How big was Sonic 2's Death Egg Zone planned to be before it got downsized to a Boss Room?"

Seconded, but it won't be the last time we need to split off/recombine the discussions. There's a lot of moving parts here given all the new information so cross pollination between threads is inevitable!

 

The quote says that Mecha would have been a mid boss in the middle of the zone, not act. So it sounds to me like it would have been a two-act zone with Mecha at the end of act 1.

Having a boss in the middle of an act sounds extremely unlikely to me, considering they never do that.

The notion that act 1 would have been a full act while act 2 would have been just a boss room doesn't fit that quote, as again, it claims Mecha would have been at the middle of the zone, making it sound as though the two acts would have had similar length.

 

Sky Sanctuary did it twice. Anything's possible.

 

At the same time, Mecha Sonic being a boss at the end of act 1 still sounds unlikely to me if there are two full acts, because there are no act 1 bosses anywhere else in the game. "Middle of the zone" doesn't necessarily mean both acts are equal size, it could just mean "between act 1 and act 2".