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

Never did I expect that Genocide/Cyber City would go from one of the most unknown zones in Sonic 2, to us learning about the entire level maps, and getting graphics, gimmicks, cutscenes and badniks; not to mention that if we were to dive into theories, we might know the song used for the level.

But considering the fact that we might get more stage maps, I personally hope its either from Wood or Sand Shower (or Death Egg!), or from a level we know next to nothing about (Tropical Sun, Ocean Wind, Blue Lake and Rock World/Winter).

Lastly, I'm surprised that Sonic 2 turned out as well as it did; pretty much half the game was gutted along development, but it still turned out to be one of the most influential and popular games ever .

 

Hez just said that "stages" means "acts" in this context, so I doubt that we're gonna see any maps other than ones from Genocide City and Metropolis.

That being said, the whole "There will be surprises" -thing has me thinking that we are gonna see some new stuff that didn't belong to Tom Payne's stages; maybe these documents actually belonged to STI as a whole and therefore contain some of Brenda Ross' assets from either Sand Shower or the winter zone? And since we still don't know much about the creation of Sky Chase and Wing Fortress, maybe we'll see definitive proof of the whole "reused GCZ assets" -theory that we've been juggling around for a while now.

But regardless, we're so close to getting all the answers that speculation at this point in time is a bit ridiculous.

 

All I ask is we get all the documents publicly available within a reasonable amount of time, but it sounds like that's going to happen next week, if not on the 12th, not long after.

And for those who are impatient, that thumbnail appears to be from the early sections of this area, which looks to be part of Act 2's layout:
https://imgur.com/L5dBZm3
https://imgur.com/dIiFOxY

Here's the versions of Act 1, 2 and 3 that we've had released publicly so far:
https://info.sonicretro.org/images/0/0d/Genocide_city_act_1_layout.png
https://info.sonicretro.org/images/5/51/Genocide_city_act_2_layout.png
https://info.sonicretro.org/images/d/db/Genocide_city_act_3_layout.png

Here are Hez's earlier video layouts again, for reference. Obviously these are... prototypes of a... recreation of a never actually made prototype stage based on... unused assets of a never made prototype of the unreleased version of the game...!? Ooh, my head hurts!

External Links showing all of the Gifs of gameplay from the stage:
https://imgur.com/a/KmrSW5V


From Hez's own Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ManiaHez/status/1648341852502867968
Much Earlier Gif from last April:
https://twitter.com/ManiaHez/status/1642732694269206528

Other Misc OFFICIAL Assets (Including Tom Payne Documents and unreleased B-Bomb tiles suspected to be recycled from the zone):
https://imgur.com/a/hzofSv0

Bonus:
Very early version Hez was working on last year before all this came to light
https://twitter.com/i/status/1595989291791839233

 

Didn't somebody who looked at the palette data deduct that this specific piston was meant for Metropolis? Because it really seems likely that we're also gonna be seeing a lot of early Metropolis assets, and it's a bit of a shame how all of the Genocide City stuff will inevitably overshadow them.

The colors here are based on the concept art and illustrated chunks, right? It actually looks a lot like Metallic Madness Bad Future.

 

Even if that's true, beta/alpha metropolis is so closely tied to GCZ it's still relevant to this thread, as Tom Payne exclusively worked on both during development. You can especially see it when you see how Metropolis 3 Simon Wai evolved from an earlier draft that appeared to have leftover GCZ concepts.

Regardless, I'm just trying to collect all the relevant info in this thread. Eventually, we'll have a lot more. Don't nitpick too much yet, please.

 

I wasn't nitpicking, this stuff absolutely does belong in this thread imo. I'm just disappointed that nobody's gonna pay attention to all the cool Metropolis stuff we're gonna get because people are more interested in Genocide City. And the worst case scenario is that the few people who do pay attention are gonna claim that they're actually GCZ assets instead.

 

You know, I hope that we will really get all these information and documents in open access.
I remember some time ago they've got Aladdin source, and just made article about that, without leaking code or smth.
Ik that it's different things, but it would be pretty pity, if they will say "we've got some cool stuff that you've never seen, but we are not going to show you it".
I hope you understood me correctly. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

 

As long as it's properly categorized and labeled I think people will eventually sort out what is what after the initial hype dies down.

 

Personally speaking I'm most interested in seeing the assets for Genocide City Zone. So I'm not too bothered about anything else. There's just something about the zone that is amusing and makes you want to know more. The silly name. The fact it never made it to a known prototype. The mystery surrounding its role in the game. I'm looking forward to the stream on Tuesday!

 

We made a really big way from "It was never implemented in game" to "WE HAVE ALL GRAPHICS FOR THIS ZONE"

It's a pitty that stream will be at time when I'm sleeping.. but what to do. This is the fate

 

Again, remember that this is @Hez's recreation based on documents and assets found, and not the actual level in a playable form, or it's graphics. We might never actually find the full level graphics in it's intended presentation.

 

Yeah I want to put heavy emphasis on this. It's clearly marked what is recreations, and what is real. It is inevitable that some will run with it as real regardless (see the Sonic 1 Tokyo Toy Show remake), but we can at least get ahead of it here.

 

Our wiki won't have the recreations so you'll be able to point people to that.

 

a huge issue that the Pendulum archival community (and anyone interested in drum & bass history) has is that you have people hoarding dubplates (demo vinyls), quite often with no prices listed on discogs, because they want the clout. None of these tracks really exist outside of these acetates (except for potato-quality set recordings, if they even existed back then) so you can imagine the frustration.

 

Well, here it is, for Patrons at least. I'll let you know what I think once I've browsed through it all.

EDIT: Patrons do not get this one early, the premiere for everyone is tomorrow. However, a teaser image of Hez's recreation was included:

 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/94444272

The Patreon Article is fully public. Text is as follows.

"The following is part of our 25-day Holiday Countdown Calendar! Every day from December 1st through the 25th, we're posting a cool game history treat, and $5 and up Patrons get access one day early!

This is all part of our annual Winter Fundraiser donation drive, where we ask those who are able to generously give what they can so that we can continue thriving. If you're able to make an additional one-time charitable contribution, this really is the best time to do so, as your donations will be DOUBLED thanks to a generous group of sponsors! Head on over to gamehistory.org/donate to learn more and give today.

Normally, as a patron you'd be getting our Tuesday content 24 hours early, but today's a little bit different!

We've been working hard on a mini documentary about some of the lost stages from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and some of the new cutting room floor material we've managed to preserve in 2023. Sonic 2 is a game that was practically trimmed in half from its original conception, so there's actually a fascinating wealth of material that didn't make it into the final game. I explain a lot of how this came about in the video, so I hope you'll tune in.

I want everyone to be surprised at the same time, as we've uncovered something cool that has never been seen before! So instead of our normal method of keeping the video unlisted and showing it to you 24 hours early, we decided to do a YouTube Premiere for everyone, tomorrow at 10am Pacific. This way, not only do we avoid anyone spoiling things early, we also get to capture the video's live chat for posterity. I've also made this Patreon post public for everyone instead of our normal locked early access, on the off-chance someone sees the title and joins just to see the video early.

Here's a small sneak peek, which might look familiar if you happened to watch us on this year's Preserved Play stream. This is a partial reconstruction of a cut stage called "Cyber City," using surviving documents from zone artist Tom Payne. We overlaid some new sprite art by Sonic homebrew author Hez, which was constructed based on tiny scraps of genuine Cyber City art that survived, as well as some of Tom's later art for Sonic Spinball that seems to have used Cyber City as its basis.



I really can't get enough of Yasuhara's adorable interpretation of Sonic.

I really like this approach to reconstructing levels based on partial data. We just don't have everything we would need to present something true to what the original vision would have been, we just have a handful of real pieces and some partial clues about others, so Hez and I struck a balance between educated guesswork and sticking to the facts in front of us. I imagine fleshed out fan interpretations will come later, but I wanted the first historical record to be a little bit more objective, as unofficial reconstructions have a nasty habit of being later interpreted as the genuine article.

There's more in the video, and I promise even if you've been following the bits and pieces of this we've been teasing, there's going to be at least one surprise for you. And if you're the type who likes rolling your sleeves up and digging into source material, we've got a whole bunch of it. See you tomorrow!"

The last line makes it sound like the documents will also drop tomorrow or very soon, which matches with Frank's prior state of intent to put all this up on internet archive. Let's hope so!

(I also hope a playable version of Hez's demo will indeed drop either at the same time, or not long after, recreation or not.)

 

It's really going to be quite a different type of Sonic 2sday tomorrow

 

Would Cyber City even be that fun to play? I always wondered about that

 

When you take into account the Metropolis X Labyrinth level design structure plus WATER, I highly doubt it. But this will still be incredibly interesting to see regardless.

I'm also curious what the extra parts we haven't seen yet could be, because... well, what could they be? What else is there to uncover that we don't already know about?

 

Well, we know for certain there's at least one scan of early Metropolis object art we didn't previously know of - a door for the furnace-like transport tube entrances, which Hez posted a digital recreation of a while back. We've still not seen the original scan for that yet, so that's bound to be part of it. Remember that anything we see is most likely related to either Cyber City or Metropolis, given the original source of the documents.