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

Just to set expectations a little bit toward reality, what we have in this stack that wasn't previously scanned is level layouts for the three acts of Cyber City as seen in the stream, layouts of some early Metropolis, and the sprite printouts seen in that photograph I took in 2019. There are a couple little bits and pieces that provide some tiny clues for other things like early palettes and some enemy sketches that didn't get scanned the first time for whatever reason, but please don't expect to have all of this game's mysteries solved by one of the zone artists. This really is "Cyber City layout plus some miscellaneous crumbs."

 

Regardless the stuff mentioned still paints a much better picture of what the zone could have been like than the big blue screen of emptiness we had in the Simon Wai Beta beforehand. :P

(I don't think we were even expecting enemy sketches either.)

 

Well sure. But if anyone here tore through Sonic 2 in Nov 1992 and then said "well great, but where's Genocide City ", I'd love to hear your story lol

Every crumb is scrumptious. Looking forward to it!

 

Realistically, only so many assets for an incomplete/lost zone would have ever even be made in the first place. Whatever is given to us is more than we had before and will likely still help resolve some interesting questions. We appreciate anything that can be salvaged.

 

I was like that with Indeterminate Western Desert Zone and Hidden Palace Zone because they cropped up in magazines I had subscriptions to in the early '90s. I didn't know anything about Genocide City Zone until the beta first surfaced.

 

I hate that you made me realize this was 30 + years. At this point I'm happy we're getting anything at all, and I look forward to whatever we get. With all the prototypes we have now, it's amazing we still get more. I hope it encourages more devs to release stuff in the future.

 

This honestly sounds really interesting. Would you happen to have a post or video of some kind that goes more into this, by chance?

 

I would also be interested in this.

I feel that there is another titbit about music that is noteworthy and may challenge the notion that all tracks were roughly where they needed to be in the prototypes.

The invincibility theme in Simon Wai is what was eventually the Super Sonic theme. I don’t believe this was ever intended to be the regular invincibility theme, as it shares a section (I’m going to call this a bridge, idk) with the special stage theme:

7 seconds:


From the start:


The regular invincibility theme doesn’t yet exist in the Simon Wai, presumably as it was still being worked on.

Interestingly, Sonic 1 has one main theme that pops up at the start and end of the game, and is shared by the invincibility theme. Sonic 2 on the other hand has three noteworthy leitmotifs:

1) The Sonic The Hedgehog Theme.
2) The Super Sonic “bridge”.
3) Sweet Dreams (ending, options screen).

I hear some similarities in notes between the Super Sonic bridge and Sweet Dreams, but I’m less than an expert and unable to explain what I’m hearing.

Perhaps they weren’t sure if or how they were going to change the regular invincibility theme and if so, what it would share a common theme with at this stage, so didn’t implement it yet?

In any event, I don’t think we can wholly trust the placement of music in the prototypes, though what’s been suggested so far does seem to make sense, other than Death Egg which seems again to be the outlier.

 

some of the protos have been known to have been leaked, copied and sold, it's entirely possible some poor kid got a dodgy unfinished sonic 2 and figured out the level select code.

 

I remember hearing that the Simon Wai build was sold in Asian territories.

 

In fact the first Sonic 2 that my sister bought was one of those betas, one that started on Aquatic Ruins. We went to return the game (we knew how it was supposed to be cos my father had it) and we didn't actually believe the store guy when he told us that it was a beta version; then he returned a proper version instead.

 

Once upon a time, people of the internet would have killed to have that cartridge. Of course we eventually made in-roads, but still. You probably didn't realize the value of what you had at that time. Having those things sold on the black market was "normal", so a lot of folks where this was taking place didn't think much of it, or they demanded the finished product. Because, naturally, who would want something incomplete?

 

"Simon Wai beta" was VERY common cartridge in that time in a east part of world, and if you buy S2 cartridge, with 90% probability you'll got beta.
Sometimes it seems to me that the influence of Simon Wai is overestimated, because a person literally downloaded random rum on a random site, and everyone began to consider it the holy grail, although there is so much of this rum on physical media that it's amazing how it remained a secret


*gets a tomato in the face*

 

I remember a friend of my cousin back in late 90s that was obsessed with going through every Sonic 2 cart he could find because of having "as he claimed it" seen one with the title screen from the manual. He also claimed you could spin dash in a special version of Sonic 1 and that in one version of Sonic 3 if you jumped before Knuckles hit you(in the intro) you would avoid losing all the emeralds. Ofc we didn't believe him...

 

The little you knew at the time...right...? ^^"

 

I mean, if this was late 90s and you guys were young enough to not know better, it’s possible this referred to Sonic Jam.

 

Possibly, cos although there are modified versions of Sonic 1 around (the cart we have for example, it starts with 40 lives instead of the usual 3 and the usual skipping of SEGA screen), they are simpler edits rather than adding a whole new thing from the sequel.

 

I haven't seen anybody comment on this yet, but what's up with the disconnect in the palette? The chunk layout shows a bronze-grey palette for the foreground, but the palette line seen in the object art primarily uses purple.

Is it possible that purple was an accent color, and the level art was primarily bronze? Or did they change the level's color scheme after creating the chunk layout? Would love to hear people's thoughts on this, as I haven't seen anybody notice this yet.

(I'm sure the real answer is boring but I like to speculate)

 

Metropolis Zone shows that the colour of Zones sometimes shifted during planning - we have two versions of the Zone's concept art demonstrating this. The neatly-coloured version shown in Origins has the foreground coloured grey, similar to Scrap Brain Zone. The more scribbly version we originally had access to has it green like the in-game version - combined with the very rough colouring style, this would suggest it was likely a quick rough test to see how the newer colours might look.

Though we only have two versions of the Cyber City concept art - the uncoloured lineart, and the neatly-coloured version seen in Origins - it's interesting to note that the colouring matches neither the chunk layout sketches nor the palette seen on the printouts of digital assets. It's closer to the chunk layout in that it does at least include a gold/bronze hue, but only for the far background, with the foreground in grey instead. So that's three different colour schemes for one stage! It seems like there was quite a bit of debate about how it should look palette-wise.

 

Interestingly, the Cyber City layouts that feature that gold/bronze hued chunks evoke Wing Fortress's final color palette. Perhaps it's simply a coincidence, but given the possibility that WFZ inherited some leftover bits and pieces from the aborted CC, there could be something to that? Even if it just inspired the ultimate palette for the zone (ie. "Oh hey, this gold/bronze color should be used somewhere...how about this flying airship?!")