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

Are we talking about this music?


With all due respect to Javelosa, I can see why this was not the direction they wanted to go in with music. He mentioned in the comments that the ROM was custom built so that might be why its dated well after Sonic 2 (1994). The description has a copyright date for 1992. In terms of where this fits in the timeline, unless I'm missing a good context comment he seems to not say for certain.

He says it was "...composed for a Sonic level in general." when asked if it was intended for a cutscene so I take that as it was more of a rogue composer making Sonic music as a "what if" and not an actual order by the Sonic 2 team.

"I was on staff when i wrote and produced this at Sega of America. S2 was done in Japan so most of my music was only on SOA titles" To be fair, 30+ year memory and such so I don't expect a razor sharp recollection, but he doesn't say much specific about Sonic 2 that makes me think he was that close on the project at any point, even with the music. Maybe they were in the same building (both STI and Sega Multimedia Studio were in Redwood during Sonic 2's development) and so there was just enough overlap.

Edit: His distinction of "SOA" implies to me that he considers all of SOA to be the developer and not the individual units that make up SOA.

 

Reiko Kodama was involved with Sonic 1 in multiple capacities and her work made it into the game, I don't think mysogony played a part in what went into the games. If anything, Reiko Kodama's closeness with many people on the team when she would have been their senior would have given the group experience working under such an extraordinary woman. I would far more be willing to believe it was xenophobia that made the American zones get axed, not misogyny.

 

I am still shocked that we've had original Sand Shower art under our noses the entire time.
Such an amazing discovery.

I hope to see a good recreation of the Sand shower/Winter hill cave wall, as the original recreation made from the magazine mockup was scuffed compared to the detailed one we have now.

 

An observation. Blue Lake was originally in the north of the map, and appeared to be the lake on the mountains where the Death Egg was:



However, later maps appear to move it to the center of the map, in middle of the sea:


Which goes with the name change of Blue Lake > Blue Ocean. It also means that it became the counterpart to Ocean Wind and Oil Ocean, further justifying the name change.

This also suggests that Olympus is above Blue Ocean. Makes me wonder if the ruins in the Blue Ocean concept art are supposed to be Olympus' after it got destroyed in the ruined past and presumably sunk to the bottom of the sea (as the original past map showed no land under it, suggesting it was was floating on water).

 

The Death Egg over a lake...

Sounds a lot like Launch Base Zone. Reused idea perhaps?

 

If I may add more fuel to this fire, check this out.

Here's the Death Egg in Yasuhara's sketch of Angel Island. Notice how it's submerged in a lake leading into a waterfall on top of a mountain, just like it is in Launch Base Zone.



Because here's the Blue Lake dome in Yasuhara's Sonic 2 Present map.

 

Indeed, the Death Egg on a lake thing seems inspired by early S2 concepts.

I can't help but wonder, though, why it was on a lake originally. S3K justified it by the Death Egg having crash-landed there, but S2? It seems weird that Eggman would choose to build it on water, so maybe it was knocked down there by Sonic in the past via time travel shenanigans?

Like, the idea might have been that in the original present map you see that dome thingie on the lake and have no idea what it's all about. Then during one of your trips to the past you board the Death Egg and knock it down, it falls on the lake and you go "Oh, so that thing was the Death Egg all along!"

 

I'd consider 2 initial ideas for Death Egg on the lake:
1) Onsen Tamago: this is a very common way to prepare eggs in Japan and literally means "hotspring egg" and consists on cooking eggs on a hotspring (or simulating it). It's a lake, not a hotspring, but nonetheless there could be a connetion.

2) Cooling: not with the idea of being technical, but mecha is a popular subgenre in anime and manga, and some stories deal with having pools of water for cooling. Could be that this idea transpired when conceptualizing the Death Egg. In my case, I remember Mazinger Z.

I wonder myself about the idea of a big egg on top of a mountain, that seems to be a common trope in japanese productions, but I'm uncertain of its origin.


Also, a small reminder that the 2nd Past map has remnants of an erased (?) zigurat in its original position, a building like Olympus on the West, on a piece of land connected to the mountains, and the zigurat is actually not drawn but sticked on top.

 

Yeah I've wondered if it is in fact the Death Egg we're always looking at on the map and not some other kind of egg. The whole dragon egg aspect of S3's story always did seem weirdly particular and I wonder if that concept somehow has its origin here. Someone else pointed out how the dome is missing its metal plating in Ancient Time. Could mean nothing but also could mean it's a giant dinosaur egg

Could just be a barely-built Death Egg or something but I do find it peculiar that the map feels the need to reference dinosaurs at all and not much else.

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Eggdome was some kind of dragon egg, heated by lava etc.

The dragon idea was persisting in Sonic Team heads, even in the Adventure days.

 

I've been thinking about this today and the thing with the lake and the egg can be much simpler: we tend to forget that at this point the island of the story is South Island, the same from Sonic 1 and, although I'm not sure how canon the 8-bit version would be, the thing is that the central mountains had cascades of water flowing from the top. If they were to respect this original design, would be totally expected that having a giant egg in the mountains, it would be in a lake with all that water coming from the top, or even itself be the responsible of forming the lake.

That totally makes sense. If this is South Island, where does this giant egg came from? Why was not there in Sonic 1?
The thing is that in the concept timelines, unlike the concept art, the egg is not in the initial present, it appears after traveling to the past.


At this point I'm going to speculate for the sake of trying to figure out what might be going on. Adding some details to kazz and Forte's ideas, seems like if the Eggdomes (can we assume that the central dome is the Death Egg since the last battle in space has been stablished?) would be real eggs, brought from the past to be mechanized, and maybe used as the source of energy for the domes. Yasuhara in the presentation where he showed these maps for the first time, casually dropped the map for "After a bit tsunami" disconnected from the rest and without much explanation, but the thing is that the egg is not in that art. Could be the egg cracking (Godzilla?), being moved in time, or something else, but a natural disaster at random seems quite odd... this is not Sim City 2000.
And if the idea of the Death Egg being an actual egg was carried over somehow after the changes and release of Sonic 2 as a secret (?), that would be a backstory for the dragon from Sonic 3 concept art, awakened and cracked from the Death Egg falling into the volcano of Angel Island. That would be a better tailored story than the Black Dragon just reawakening in Superstars for... reasons. Again, I'm speculating, joining some dots here and there.

 

I'll be completely honest, I'm not buying this connection.

Nothing we know suggests that the dragon alluded to in Sonic 3 development material was initially planned for Sonic 2, other than the fact that most cut Sonic 2 elements were revived for 3. But by that logic, we might as well say that Knuckles was originally planned for Sonic 2.

The timeline maps are full of little inconsistencies and errors, so the Past map's dome missing a few lines could just be a red herring for all we know.

 

No one's insisting it with confidence or anything. Though there already is a connection between the dome in the lake and Launch Base anyway. It doesn't take any stretching to assume there could've been other connections. My inclination that it's a dinosaur egg has nothing to do with S3's story anyway.

 

Well, it's OK to not buy an idea (honestly, it's not something I believe, I was just joining concepts), but I think there's a big misinterpretation on what I tried to explain: I never said that was planned for Sonic 2. I'm with kazz, I think they just considered a big egg for powering the Death Egg. My point is that if the Death Egg is supposed to have a real egg inside, that could be the idea for the dragon in early stages of conceptualizing Sonic 3.

I didn't mention this for some missing lines, it was for exactly the opposite:





Whenever the central egg appears or disappears some attention marks were drawn.

 

I agree that the Death Egg being absent in the regular present is deliberate. We have two separate timeline documents that depict it in the past and ruined present but not the original present.

Going by level names, those documents were made after the initial maps. So the idea of it being in the original present must have been dropped early on.

 

Well, maybe I just have a hard time personally accepting this notion that the Death Egg was a real egg once, because it just seems a bit too... silly?

Gigantic eggs are a somewhat prevalent trope in Japanese media, that is true. So is the fact that Knuckles mistook the Death Egg for a real egg in Sonic 3's manual.

But the idea that Eggman built an orbital superweapon from an enormous egg just seems a bit too absurd even for this series. Besides, the only egg motifs present in either concepts, prototypes or the final game are ones related to Eggman himself, and they obviously are themed after said character's name rather than any real egg.

 

It was an idea dropped for some reason, and that's a good one.

Nonetheless, if you consider that badniks are mechanical animals powered by real animals inside, I don't see it that disconnected from the series lore that a big giant mechanical egg station is powered by a real egg inside.

Not trying to convince anyone, just trying to make clear my way of thinking. I'm kind of playing devil's advocate at this point, I'm not that convinced with this idea either.

 

Just throwing this out there, but maybe the Death Egg was just disguised as a giant natural egg as a cover while it was being built so that Sonic wouldn't catch on?

 

Yeah, that seems to have been the intent since the Death Egg wouldn't have been revealed to Sonic/the player until after completing the past map, before returning to the (now ruined) present.

I assume the Death Egg was removed from the normal present since the ruined present was a result of the Death Egg's construction in the past. Having the Death Egg on the original South Island would have been a plothole.

 

out of curiosity, how common is this? :o the only example I can think of is the Wind Fish's Egg from Link's Awakening, but I had thought that was a function of the game being overly and intentionally surreal.