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

In the case of the Wind Fish Egg it's a central element of the main story, thus easy to remember and document. What I meant (and guess Jaxer too) is that it's an element which you can see in episodes or arcs in a story, not necessarily as a central main element, thus a bit hard to bring examples, it's just an element which we see along the years and it's installed in the background as part of the common tropes.

So it took a bit of (re)research and (re)discovery to answer this:

- "Doraemon: Nobita's Dinosaur" (1980) is the first Doraemon film. This theme was revisited in 2020's 40 movie "Nobita's New Dinosaur".



- "Angel's Egg" is a 1985 film created by Yoshitaka Amano (artist for Speed Racer, Gatchaman, and Final Fantasy) and directed by Mamoru Oshi (anime director of Ghost In The Shell and Urutsei Yatsura).



- "Protect! The Dinosaur Egg" (2013) is the 3rd movie of Majime ni Fumajime Kaiketsu Zorori, some random anime I had never head of and have no idea what's about.



- "Seven Deadly Sins: Prisoners of the Sky" is a 2018 anime film of the series Seven Deadly Sins that features a giant egg on top of a mountain... on a floating island (check 13:20).



And... I think this could be considered "cheating" but there's also "Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg" by Sonic Team in 2003.



I think I could remember episodes here and there of a character climbing a mountain for making some giant omelet or maybe some of Gon's stories, nothing I could narrow to document. I don't know much about Godzilla but there's a chance giant eggs are featured given the amount of giant reptiles in that franchise. Just some examples I found from Dragon Ball:

 

There is also I am Umasou (good movie btw). It's about dinosaurs who live near a volcano, and there is a giant egg-shaped rock ontop of it.



(Spoilers for the end of the movie) At the end, the volcano erupts, sending the egg into orbit. Kinda like the death egg i guess?

 

I've been watching the Godzilla movies recently so I can actually answer this. Godzilla himself is not shown in egg form, but there are other notable eggs in the movies; Rodan hatches from a giant egg hidden inside a mountain cave, and Baby Godzilla hatches from an egg in his debut movie. The most prominent egg is Mothra's, mostly because she has a whole death/reincarnation gimmick and also because she is usually one of the first monsters brought back when they reboot. Mothra hatches from a giant ranbow colored egg like five or six times in those movies. (Ironically, mothra's egg reminds me of chao eggs.)

 

yeah I had not heard of most of these (Amano worked in anime?????), and I didn't even make a connection to Billy Hatcher. tysm, I love finding out something new!

 

Hello people.
I was looking to s2 disasm and found, that Sonic has....blinking animation?
I found SonAni_Blink (or smth like this), and I tried to import new art for it to look, how it works, and... it doesn't work at all?
Ok, no. For the first I thought that it's special for waiting animation, but when I changed it-nothing changed.. weird.
Blinking itself worked only once and only when you endlessly press C in debug mode. You can't see it other way.
Can it be an evidence, that Sonic could have same blinking animation as Tails, or I'm just blind and dummy?

 

DEZ's background in the final game seems a bit odd.


It gives the impression that the Death Egg itself is moving rapidly through space. Earth and the stars speed by at a rapid pace, which if you consider what was repurposed for Sonic 3, doesn't make much sense. Even Doomsday Zone doesn't scroll that fast. According to Totoya, the background was created before the zone was scrapped, but was it always meant to scroll that fast? It seems like the kind of BG that would scroll with Sonic's movement. Maybe when the zone was cut, they made it scroll automatically to make it seem more "intense".

 

a moving image of space is more interesting than a static one in a stage that is mostly static

 

Do I have a Mandela effect, or Sonic 2 had an early/alternative/unused cover art?
I remember somewhere was a footage/screenshot from sega studio, where were some Sonic art on walls, and there was a jp covert art of Sonic 2, but drawing was more rude and behind characters stood a death egg robo....

Does anybody else remember it? Is it was fan art or it was really somewhere in sega studio footages???

 

No evidence of any early box art exists, only early promo art...
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...-2-prelim-not-mine-recent-private-sale.38102/

The earliest version of Greg Martin's S2 box art had different colors for tails, closer to his early version colors.

Perhaps someone made the early promo art into fake box art at some point.
https://x.com/GameArtOfficial/status/1039963504168579077

There's also this weird thing someone found with a simon wai beta bootleg cart...

 

Not a Japanese cover, but I remember once seeing what appeared to be an early US cover of the game set in Emerald Hill, where Sonic was doing the same pose as in the final cover, Tails was braking with his feet next to him and Robotnik was in the back, driving the Egg Drillster.

However, this could've also been just fanart.

 

Maybe you're half remembering Gutteridge's work. He did some Sonic art which was based off Martin's work but had Sonic doing things based off the levels
https://info.sonicretro.org/Category:Artwork_by_Duncan_Gutteridge

 

Nope, it was distinctly Greg Martin's art style, and exactly like my description. It was also an early pencil sketch, with some parts being clearly more finished than others.

But now that I'm really thinking about it, it most likely was fanart.

 

I remember seeing what you're talking about somewhere here on these forums. If my memory's right, it was from the same sketchbook as that unused cover for Spinball.

 

If someone else remembers it, then it might've been official after all.

I therefore went looking for unfinished artwork attributed to him, and while I didn't find what I was looking for, I did find this piece of Sonic running through Metropolis Zone.



I don't know where this image is from, but it's nowhere on the Wiki as far as I can tell.

 

How curious is that rather than anywhere else in the zone seems like an exact take on the concept art, with (almost) the exact same layout for all the elements.

Edit: Seems that I was not the only one to notice it.

 

Apparently there's a pencil sketch of that cover that casually found out searching about this.
https://sonicretro.org/2014/01/06/the-sonic-sketchbook-images-from-the-late-greg-martin/

Found it.
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/buyataris-sonic-art-pics.31346/page-4#post-925659

 

I knew it was real.

And now that I can get a closer look at it, I can't help but find certain details really fascinating.

First of all, not only does Robotnik have the small, beady eyes from western promo art for Sonic 1, but Duncan Gutteridge's calendar artwork of him has almost identical composition, with him driving the Egg Drillster over a dirt path with a fist in the air.



Also, the Buzzers have something coming out of their torsos.


They can't be lasers, since they shoot those from their stingers. They look like searchlights to me, so was this supposed to be a nighttime scene?

 

Zomg, I forgot about EHZ cover, and, I really didn't knew about Metropolis artwork, lmao!
HOVEWER, I think that image that I remember, it's not an artwork from wiki.. I remember how it was big and was on the wall of the room in one of documentary about Sonic.. maybe I should search it by myself.

 

In the final sequence of Wing Fortress Zone, when Sonic jumps from the Tornado to Robotnik's ship and this one then attaches to the Death Egg, there are a number of changes in the background scrolling speed to reflect the sequence, being the last part when the ship reaches the Death Egg the one that scrolls faster.

There's a chance that they just reused the background as was in WFZ and hence the scolling speed is abnormally higher as an oversight, since we know Death Egg Zone (the released version) was retextured, rushed and had some oversights (namely the door).

Nonetheless, although they indeed could have resused the parameters of WFZ, I'm absolutely not fully convinced of this, since I noticed that the background is actually different and the scrolling speed seems even faster in DEZ. Which is kind of odd at the same time because why make different textures for the same element (notice the planet)? Maybe there's a good explanation (could be that since the background in WFZ had also clouds, had to make a simpler version? it still is different), I'm just not sure.

Min 3:00

 

If it can help you with anything- final sequence uses same bg as DEZ, maybe even same scroll code. Maybe this is the reason. I'm too lazy to check it rn