Yeah this has all the signs of being a retailer promotion -- video stores would get a lot of those for specific movies coming out on VHS as an advertisement to buy stock to sell to customers. Makes sense for the video games to do the same
Of course it wasn't intended for consumers. Why else would they brag out all of the promotional deals they had going on? Anyway, this video tells me that when Sega wanted to send out VHS footage to magazines for them to preview, the footage was more curated than, say, this footage that Hidden Palace released in 2022. Hidden Palace says about that tape: In @Chainspike's video covering this footage, I left the following comment disputing HP's claim (edited for formatting's sake): Chainspike replied: antontehgamer3436 replied: Oh, and Chainspike also put out a comparison video for the one in the OP:
hah, it looks like the launch zone spinny cups always set Sonic to be in a walking animation in this version Special stages, at least, the layouts shown, look final. Can't speak to the sphere count. No eggman flashing when taking damage in some levels. Is that in anything we have, or is it an artifact of the VHS format (eg, refresh rate)? or could it be that these clips are put together from different builds? To some extent, shield powers do seem to be implemented. In between the "corporate tie-ins" flashes there's this blink and you miss it shot where they're using the bubble bounce, except that the shield doesn't reset its state when you hit a spring lol The Sega anim at the end looks pretty close to the Sonic 2 one used in the proto, just with the RAM bug fixed. Except it also looks like they've taken the sprite out at this point? lol