If the Death Egg could time travel, the ending may have been Sonic (or Tails, whomever) setting it to intentionally travel back in time, crash into itself, and cause a time paradox that wiped it from existence and reset everything. My guess is now that boarding the "Neo Death Egg" from space and beating it simply triggers the ending where this becomes possible. Or it could be some chaos emerald/time stone type paradox too. Maybe a Super Sonic only dues ex machina ending? Boy, this rabbithole of info keeps getting deeper and deeper, but I think you're really on to something here. The evidence and the diagrams match up reasonably nicely, and those last 2 bubbles appeared to be the present Island restored to their original form.
If this all would've been communicated to the player through animations on the world maps, then it sounds quite similar to the Sonic & Knuckles title screen, especially since Sonic Origins recontextualized it as a cutscene between LBZ and MHZ.
The Death Egg was definitely intended, at least at some point in development, to crash into the island. And this was likely repurposed into what we see in 3&K. The first Death Egg zone may have even been something similar to Launch Base, while Neo Death Egg took place on the station itself. However, I'm still of the opinion that somewhere down the line they must have realized this storyline was a confusing spaghetti mess and they wanted to streamline it. The Simon Wai build represents their clearest vision of the final product, and if it had 17 levels as intended, time travel may still have been on the table, but I believe it would've been simplified and streamlined to not hop back and forth across time periods like this.
The more we learn about Sonic 2 development and original story the more I am convinced that Sonic 3 is just "Sonic 2 as originally envisioned" & Knuckles.
Sky Chase really does sound like a Christmas/winter themed musical track. I feel silly for not noticing it for so long.
Those bells are the Westminster Quarters bell chime, a staple of grandfather clocks and the church. While not associated with Christmas per se, it can be heard in a lot of Christmas or winter-themed music, including Very Merry Christmas by Dreams Come True, where that four-note melody is very prominent. I can only find this version on Youtube, which is a new version done recently. But the ORIGINAL version was released in 1990.
Speaking of the music, I think I finally realized why I don't like the theories of CNZ 2P being meant for either OOZ or GCZ - it's because it sounds extremely similar to Spring Yard Zone. Just compare the two: Since CNZ is basically an evolved version of SYZ's concept, maybe this track was always meant for CNZ after all.
100%, although they didn't even really achieve some of their own ambitions even in S3K, now that we saw the original concepts for the level transitions and the cut Knuckles-exclusive zones.
Both are very New Jack Swing in style, and I never noticed the similarity. Good catch. My personal opinion is CNZ 2-Player was an unused special stage theme, as was the 2-Player results theme. By Sonic 3K they'd designed 3 additional bonus games in addition to the chaos emerald special stage, so possibly these were conceptualized during the Sonic 2 development but ended up getting mothballed until later.
Sonic 2 having a New Jack Swing sound is fairly standard since Masa's style was heavily influenced by Michael Jackson, who was very big into that genre at the time. I don't think Masa was thinking of a casino when he wrote this or Spring Yard, just "urban/industrial".
Scrapped ideas originating from Sonic 2 that carried over to Sonic 3: -Several concept arts/zone themes like Secret Jungle or Metropolis were transformed into new levels like Mushroom Hill and Flying Battery. -The eruption of a volcano would set the island on fire, we see something similar happening in Angel Island. -The Death Egg would crash mid-game and launched again at the end. -"Final Battle In Space" after "Neo Death Egg" = Doomsday Zone -Stage-sized Hidden Palace and Death Egg = you know -Super Sonic was meant to have a flashy multi-color pallete = Hyper Sonic
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to my knowledge it's flat out wrong to say Masato Nakamura ever leaned into New Jack Swing or was significantly influenced by Michael Jackson, specifically. Masato Nakamura isn't just some guy: Dreams Come True was the first Japanese act to ever sell 3 million physical copies of an album in 1992! These guys were big, and if Masa's music sounds jazzy, it's because jazz is basically ubiquitous in Japanese popular music, even influencing the signature royal road progression you'll hear in J-Pop. The conjunction of contemporary urban music and jazz isn't unique to New Jack Swing or to American pop music of the time.
I'm aware of who Masa is, but I am 99% certain he has cited MJ as an influence on his career in at least one interview, just as MJ cited James Brown as an influence for him. I'll see if I can find it later.
Maybe not Michael Jackson per se or even specifically, but I wouldn't say it's exactly a stretch to say that western music had an influence on Japanese pop culture, even having an influence on the type of music they would create. With video game compositions especially, I'm realizing more and more that a lot of music in early gaming "borrows" from whatever topped the charts in their time. There's riffs and references, influences and homages (and sometimes blatant plagiarism) all over the place. This can both be locally and/or abroad. Spring Yard Zone specifically seems like it's a pastiche of Bobby Brown's Every Little Step, which could be considered a song in the New Jack Swing style. And I'm not sure how many people are aware of Chemical Plant Zone's opening riff being borrowed from Prince, but at 2:36 here...
That'd be pretty cool; but even if you do find it, I'd like to see something more substantial than MJ being a general influence on his career as a whole. Michael Jackson's career itself had so many periods and encompassed so many genres, it becomes difficult to say "Sonic 1 and Sonic 2's soundtrack was heavily influenced by MJ's incursion into NJS such as Dangerous" unless there's a quote by him pointing this relationship as important. I mean, his creative process for Sonic specifically was stated to be influenced by movie soundtracks. I don't discard Western pop music of the time to be an influence overall, but I'd like to push back a bit on the rather recent narrative that NJS is, and always was, Sonic's signature musical style, so much so that even a mostly city pop artist like Masa intentionally diverted from whatever he was doing at NCT to dip his hands in it. EDIT: @DefinitiveDubs The source you may be looking for could be dead, but @Ritz once brought up that Masa once mentioned not exactly MJ, but Motown: So there's that.
I don't want to ram it down anyone's throats -- continue to think what you want. But classic Sonic music, except a few examples, is not new-jack-swing. A beat or rhythm alone doesn't make it so. Those sounds existed long before NJS was ever a thing. It's pop music. Some of it leans heavily into R&B. But NJS is a claim I have been reading for years, and it's not the case. Even Sonic 3 only has a subset of NJS-style songs, and that one had MJ writers on it.
The original site is lost to time, but I found a translated copy here. So it might've been less MJ and more the Jackson 5 or that whole era of Motown in general. I'm not sure where exactly I saw the interview I mentioned, I am almost positive it was sometime in the early 10s, and it was a video. I may have gotten his statement about Motown mixed up with MJ's influence on Sonic as a whole (like his shoes). Now that I think about it, it may not have been Masa himself answering the question, but someone else who had worked on sound programming or composing for a Sonic game. It really sucks that info like that is just casually lost to time. I remember it very vividly along with comments discussing how it made sense, yet I can't fucking find it, and I hate that. Either way, the point stands that CNZ 2P sounding like New Jack Swing or SYZ is not evidence that it was intended for CNZ. There is a mountain of evidence saying it was always for OOZ.
Is there though? I'm pretty sure that the only evidence we have is that one prototype where OOZ uses that music. Y'know, the very same prototype that uses DEZ for the 1UP jingle. I really don't think that there's anything of use we can take away from the prototypes' placement of music. For STI, getting the music to play in game was priority #1. Having all of it immediately play in the exact right places would've been much less important.
