Awesome stuff, here. One thing that's always struck me as interesting is how much more frank Japanese developer interviews are than English ones for western audiences. For instance, there's an interview with Oshima about Sonic CD where the official English translation leaves out a lot of detail and polishes it to remove any negativity. It's sorta like the difference of the behind-the-scenes stuff between Phantom Menace and Last Jedi, wherein the former it's quite blunt about all of the issues, and the latter is essentially whitewashed promotional material. Anyhow: Hmm, 5 zones. I'm going to guess that they were Hidden Palace, Sand Shower, the winter zone, Wood, and Genocide/Cyber City. That's 5 right there. Ah, if only we had the development materials of them. If we got Tom Payne's disks of early dev material, I'd hope those zones might be floating around somewhere.
They are out there somewhere... inside some cardboard storage box full of other development materials... in someone's closet or garage, collecting dust. At least we have as much as we do though, we're fortunate enough for that. Especially considering how quick people are to throw out scrapped concepts, like tossing a paper ball in the trash... destined to rot in a landfill. There's still far more that will see the light of day again, just wait and see.
Something else that caught my eye in the interview: Could they have been considering that S3 proto dropdash as far back as S2? Or since SCD shared the spindash (albeit in different form) were they considering a peelout move? They did have those extra running animations with Sonic's body pushed more forward, albeit unused. On that note, Tails even in the final game actually has a second running animation, and it's actually used.
Awesome stuff! Always fascinates me to get this behind this kind of insight! This particularl line intrigues me Could this be referring to the Peel Out that ended up in CD instead?
I can picture that. Sonic spindashes with down + jump, Tails flies with up + jump. But time constraints prevented them from implementing Tails' flight, so they gave them both the spindash. FWIW, his flight works just like that in the GG games and early Chaotix.
