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

Yeah I think it might have been added to - the tops of the cacti animate in such a way that I don't think you can match them with the earlier image (someone with better eyes than me can check the sand).

I was thinking it was cropped differently because of strange VHS reasons but it could genuinely be because this is Amiga footage, and the mockup was being displayed on a Mega Drive. Maybe the palette differences aren't down to dodgy scans after all.

 

I couldn’t find Hez’s fangame actually. Where is it?

And I see people mentioning demo playthroughs of all three acts. Where are they?

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rAC0ZkAgkFJZUNcu5EB0jMvZXYo6iwOZ

The "Sonic 1.5b" files. Either the zip or 7z.

 

It's still amazing that once one of the most unknown zones with barely any information about has got so much information revealed that it's almost on par to the about of information we have about hidden palace. Really great work for the people who helped find all the documents and the vhs portfolio tape.

 

I don't think Cyber City would've had signposts. I think it would've had act transitions. I believe you would have rode the elevator at the end of act 1.

Directly into the start of Act 2

Now I can't decide if Act 2 started at the bottom or top of the level, but there is a penciled in object looking thing that I can't figure out on the top of the stage. I think this may be what ties Act 1 and Act 2 together. Potentially this is where the cutscene/transition would've taken place?

At the end of act 2 there is clearly a fan blowing sonic, which is even present in Hez's demo. I can't tell if these things I've circled are just garbage on the paper, or poles you would grab like in wing fortress or Labyrinth zone.

And finally, this would blow sonic directly into act 3.

Credit where its due, I wouldn't have thought about this if Hez never mentioned something about a camera lock being potentially in Act 2, I had zero clue wtf he was talking about but he seemed excited.

 

Maybe I'm just bad at looking, but where can I find any of these documents? These were all (including stuff not shown in the video) posted somewhere for archival, right?

 

Its on the internet archive I believe
https://archive.org/details/tom-payne-papers

 

https://retrocdn.net/Category:Tom_Payne_Papers

Wiki wiki wiki wiki.

 

This is my first time posting to this forum so I don't have an imager yet for images.
but in malicious loose pages there's a concept page for metropolis zones background, one that doesn't look anything like the final.
it features the use of the pipes and furnaces found in the foreground (water tanks?). also of note, near the background tiles in the 16x16 there are some unused grey colored pipes from the foreground not used to my memory.
so I decided to do some reconstruction



sorry if the image is a little large. I also had a hard time telling what tom was doing with the small pipes, some look either blacked over or drawn over black, cant tell.
this is just what he labeled b.01 through b.04. there is a second doc in binder 3 showing b.05 and b.06, whatever b. means. he also sketched a chunk of red brick which are in the final background and some more tanks.
I took the liberty of coloring the four chunks in four different colors.
I bring this up because if this is the style of background he wanted for metropolise zone, then were did the final background come from, could it use repurposed cyber city tiles?
there are glowing lights, which should be out of place in a industrial revolution steam factory.

 

Gonna be completely honest, it never sat right with me how Payne's Metropolis sketches were so utterly full of references to the industrial revolution, Victorian era and steam-powered technology, only for the final level's background to look like a contemporary factory.

Then again, the final level's background does prominently feature a smaller version of one of those brown, rotating 3D drums, a gimmick that's always been unique to Metropolis alone. Maybe it was a demand from higher ups to feature advanced-looking graphics more prominently; Blast Processing and all that jazz.

 

Having a quick flick through the various papers - I can't remember if we had this one before now, but if we did I'm fairly sure we lacked the context for what was written on it when we originally got it. It's Tom Payne's notes on what each the various files contained on the disk of Sonic 1 enemy digitizer art the team were provided as reference!

Interestingly, the list to the left seems to be their originally assigned filenames, which all seem to be romanisations of fairly brief Japanese descriptions of their actual contents. The list to the right appears to be Tom's own descriptions of the contents of each file, most of which match up with the filenames used on the disk by the time it was dumped. From the looks of things it seems that, at some point after writing down his notes on what was what, he must have gone through the files on the disk renaming them to match the right-hand list - however, it seems he stopped short of finishing this task, as a few of the filenames for the versions we have still match up with the left-hand list instead.

(On a related note - while it seems the Digitizer art in question was uploaded to the wiki back in 2019, am I going mad or do no pages actually use the images?)

 

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit)/Development and friends have yet to be updated. I'd very much like someone to jump in and do that - I puts some thoughts on the talk page, but it needs some collective thought about how to organise these things.

I know I said x months ago I'd have it all up within 24 hours and put all other coverage to shame, but a) it's a busy week and b) I was only expecting level maps and a few digitiser scans, not a year's worth of Tom Payne drawings

 

I would actually say hold off for a little bit longer, simply because the beep21 interview supposedly has a second part coming, and that too may be an important piece of the puzzle to this whole mystery. Maybe give it another month or 2 since I don't think the Beep21 articles are monthly?

 

it looks like he never got the background fully finished when cyber city was cut, forcing metropolis zone to be the last full zone in the game. the final games background looks flat, slap together of random art. metropolis as a whole never felt to me like a fully polished zone, the color feels flat, the background patched together, a third act for added length and the enemies placed in such a way as to make the stage more difficult. I remember my first complete playthrough of sonic 2 when I got to metropolis zone I thought it just didn't belong, now I have an idea why.

I'll do some more messing around with backgrounds tonight, see if there's anything else of note. but probably not.

 

It's a wiki, so it can be added to later - we can make a start on the bits that won't be affected by that interview.

And of course the interview itself needs mirroring. And I think there's still quotes spread across Twitter - we need people to get stuck in and have a go.

 

Why that lore thread was locked? Wouldn't be better to lock this thread? Or lock both of them and create new one?

 

I think the idea is to that if there's a new big discovery, it should get its own thread rather than having another awkward scenario with two threads or otherwise posted in a generic Sonic 2 devlore thread and be buried in the replies.

That said, I think it's worthwhile to have a generic Sonic 2 theories thread. I was hoping that, similar to Sonic 2 HD, there would be a community effort towards constructing the original vision (or something close to it) as a hack or a fangame.

 

Holy shit I think I figured out a good chunk of the 16x16 tiles that are replaced. The key was in BOB.....

Here is bob


here is metropolis


here is the answer



EDIT:

whatever this is, is what replaced this


is what replaced this




This replaced the pipes. Holy shit...

This is what Tom drew over, but in Cyber City/Genocide City

 

Bob has ended up becoming this cornerstone of Sonic 2 development lore, once a simple joke, and yet now the key to Cyber City’s design being more accurately recreated.

Gotta say, Tom, your sense of humour really is something else.

 

There are several of it. Mods for mobile version, for S2 Absolute, several little projects, archives, Hez game.
I guess, soon we will get a tons of the Sonic 2 concept hacks, so, just wait.