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

Maybe I'm speculating but this sounds possibly like an early concept for the Tornado 2's X transformation? The description of the design doesn't necessarily add up, but the concept of the Tornado transforming to reach higher speeds does.

 

Hmm. No mention about Mystic Cave originally being a castle or anything like that.

 

The same is true in the aquatic ruins section. There's nothing that hints at the timeline of concept to full production, and I don't believe there are any talking points about when concept art were drawn, but there 'is' new information here about the process of art being developed between US and JP staff, at least from Totoya's perspective. That Oil Ocean anecdote is surprisingly blunt.

Also, in most cases, they just don't discuss how concepts evolved to become stages. That doesn't mean there wasn't debate over it. It's just not discussed here yet.

I thought the same thing. Sadly, any drawings of this "Tsuburaya mechanism" (likely an ultraman/tokusatsu/kaiju mecha reference) rocket plane were left on a disc at SEGA in 1992. It's impossible to say if they'd still have it or not.

 

I think what's most interesting about this information is the idea that if Sonic 2 had even just an extra few months of development, Hidden Palace, Wing Fortress, and Death Egg could've been full zones. Wood Zone also being seen as very unpolished isn't very surprising; even fan mods have to give the zone a lot of elbow grease and tweaks to make it look up to standard with the other zones.

It also makes me wonder how different Sonic 3 would've ended up if the ideas carried over to it were already done in Sonic 2 as originally intended.

 

Your last sentence is also an important point, we now have more direct statements about unused ideas from Sonic 2 (Ice, Sand, Hidden Palace) being recycled into Sonic 3.

Also, for those curious, I believe the Sonic Mania mod Totoya is referencing is this one:


Note the extended Death Egg Outdoor section being developed 1 hour into the video.

So yes, Sonic 2 developers do in fact watch your mod work.

Additionally, a consistent theme that's mentioned multiple times in the article is the challenges of storage limitations. The cart memory size and development time limits were the 2 key main reasons why Sonic 2 ended up the way it did. The other major factor in why stages were cut comes down to a strong desire to not have "slow, technical" zones that frequently slow the player down. This is also referenced multiple times in the interview, and it tracks very well with the way not only Sonic 2 final plays, it reads very similarly to one of the main stated reasons why R2 was cut from Sonic CD.

After Sonic 1, all team members on both sides of the pacific really wanted to emphasize his sense of speed and the organic flow of levels. Sonic CD didn't do this quite as well, but Sonic 2 very much did, and sort of defines the classic Sonic experience for I'd say the majority of gamers now.

 

I wonder if the Tails Adventures devs had access to that rocket plane sprite considering how similar it sounds to how the Sea Fox looks. As well as how conspicuously similar the Sea Fox itself is to the Tornado 2, even down to the colors.

 

"Hidden Zones" just sound like Special Stages

 

Assuming Sonic 2's cut Tornado 2 as we'll call it also had the same colour scheme then another reason it could've been cut is for using a lot of blue, which would've been sourced from Sonic's palette and cause palette conflict with Super Sonic.
Don't take that as fact in the slightest though. Just imagining what could've been for fun, as Yamaguchi states, the art's on some floppy disk in Sega's office so we can't say at all. (And especially since a lot of palette and graphics documents we have said explicitly not to use blue for most objects.)

 

Over 3 decades later and the devs are still relishing in the pain they caused players

 

This is incredible! Thanks for this and for bringing back the focus. I’m fascinated that we are finally getting a dump of puzzle pieces about the game’s development …….32 years later. I’m so happy that it wasn’t lost to time. They had to drop detain things that just didn’t meet standards nor the time to fix them. Imagine if they ran out of time not finalizing the lead up to the end after Metropolis. They had to obviously make some difficult decisions towards the end so Hidden Palace had to go. Looks like that suspected Mystic Cave pit really WAS supposed to lead to Hidden Palace after its purpose changed. That spike pit is the nastiest element of the whole game and we now know why. It was a plug put in at the very last second. Looks like they didn’t have time to even put a floor over the pit, just enough time to throw some spikes down at the bottom and move on to the next thing. To have the WFZ to DEZ transition explained in such detail and the confirmation of how DEZ as a proper zone getting cut. It all makes sense, it all totally makes sense, especially when I take my own work projects into account. This game could have been a disaster, but they cut and polished the right things, while not perfect, were most certainly palatable and the casual gamer wouldn’t see or notice the little mistakes. I feel like we’ve truly gone full circle. I’m sure there will always be more to learn, but the recent information is absolute gold. Even the original developers are fascinated but the interpretation of rereleases and mods.

The fact that they still had to cut Sonic 3 in half when reusing MANY ideas cut from Sonic 2 is telling. Either Sonic 2 was massive, or they spent to much time trying to make Sonic 3 a 3D game before returning to the tried and true formula.

 

That is not what was said like at all. Yamaguchi was expressing how he was disappointed with the final result of the spike pit, and upon seeing the pit be replaced with the entrance to Hidden Palace in 2013 thought it was a really good way to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and wish he had thought of it at the time. As far as I can tell the plan for Hidden Palace was always for the player to be taken there upon getting all the Chaos Emeralds as a tutorial for Super Sonic.

 

More than that, I'd have to check, but I think he's referencing how in Sonic Jam on Saturn, they added a spring to the spike pit to make it escapable? (in the game's "normal" mode, which had several small rebalancing changes like adding rings to S2's death egg, removing the famous barrel from the trap room in Sonic 3, ect. ect.)

If this is correct, it brings up an interesting concept that, to the team members themselves, Sonic Jam's "normal" versions of the game might be the ones they would personally consider definitive, at least until the Taxman ports. Changes were specifically made to the game that closely match ideas mentioned here in this interview.

I don't recall for sure. I'd literally have to fire up a rom and go to that exact spot, but I do seem to have a vague memory of it being fixed, but no one recalls because Sonic Jam was all but forgotten after the 1997 Saturn release, and all other versions of Sonic 2 available after than until 2013 were just the original ROM.

Also, I am officially doubling down on my theory that the name "Dust Hill" was simply a short version of "Coal Dust Hill", referencing the idea that the zone was an underground mine, right before "Oil Ocean", both in a present time period ruined by fossil fuel extractions.

 

On the topic of Wood Zone



Anyone else ever felt that this platform support looks really unfinished?

 

I feel like the interview is suggesting that Wood Zone's test map was using a not-finished tileset, so yes.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that even Brenda herself has said that the graphics were less than 50% finished. There's also a lot of places where the tree bark textures don't line up the way they're supposed to. And most importantly, doesn't Yamaguchi state in that interview that they couldn't get Wood Zone's graphics to look colorful enough in-game?



Because I'm pretty sure that Brenda's animated mock-up here has a lot more colors.

 

This part is interesting, because not only is he saying the cartridge would be almost entirely full had HPZ and DEZ been completed just on their own, but if even just two of the other zones had been included, the game would have needed a save feature, meaning a save feature was definitely being planned at some point. This lends credence to my theory that the 2P Results theme was composed for a save menu.

 

It also might explain why they created level icons for all zones.

 

I don't think that means save was definitely planned. I think it means it was something that was considered. But it who knows how seriously it was taken, or if any planning for it began.

But if any planning did begin, as mentioned prior, those level select icons would fit nicely there.

Keep in mind that STI wanted a save feature for Kid Chameleon (which REALLY should have had one, or a password system at a bare minimum). Sega didn't want to pay for it. The cost of an 8Mb cartridge was already pushing it. That was earlier the same year. Compared to Nintendo, Sega was not big on game saves.

 

Again, something this interview repeatedly emphasizes is how much of the game's cut content could be placed on the challenges of fitting everything in an 8meg cart.

A lot of the challenges of building the game's visuals and structure were up against these limits. In retrospect, it also makes clear how much more ambitious the full S3&K became and how that justified much larger storage.

 

What's also notable is that we finally got confirmation on how the bosses in DEZ were meant to be handled - no bosses in Act 1, Mecha Sonic as Act 2's mid-boss and the Death Egg Robot as the final boss in a large arena.

Going off of this, the final DEZ might just be the latter half of the original zone's Act 2, assuming that a map for it was ever created.