Sonic CD's Mysterious Cut R2 Level Discussion - Post Origins Edition

Ending, not opening.

The rumor has merit. We can clearly see what look like silos in the animation, which are right where cactuses and similar-looking silos are on the D.A. Garden map.



I have to assume R2 is somewhere on this map, and that area sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

The zone cards? Putting them side-by-side, I would say not.

2GG matches 1MD the best, and no unique CD sprites are used as reference. (Closest thing is there being shading on the minecart eyes similar to the unused upside down CD one, but it's not a very strong match like all the rest of the 1MD sprites are.) It's true CD and 1MD have a few identically drawn frames between themselves, but I'd call those "1MD sprites that got reused in CD" and not just "CD sprites."

 

Re: the reused art speculation:
I mean, this tileset sure looks like a Sonic CD-ized Marble Zone to me… it shows up nowhere else.

 

I assume they drew that map after R2 was scrapped, as nothing in it resembles Marble-esque ruins.

 

That is totally R2 and likely the only assets made for it until it got scrapped. How on earth I didn't realize these tiles weren't used anywhere else in the level beyond this section is mind blowing. I recall reading it was scrapped for being boring (not sure if visual, or layout wise) and these tiles are pretty bland albeit the statue.

 

Perhaps they added it as an easter egg for themselves then, a remnant of what once was.

 

Oh. I had never noticed that either. But I wonder, why do we have a full-on animation featuring R2 if it was scrapped so early in development, and so few assets were produced for it?

 

Animation takes time. Materials were probably handed off to the studio many months in advance.

 

I wonder if the cacti on the final map refer to anything, or if they are some inside joke about how the level was “deserted.”

 

The image urls you are using are breaking the board's IMG feature, because you're linking to an image with some weird nonsense revision query string as well (probably wikia.) I corrected them in my quoted post so you can see for example:

vs

 

I think they miiiight be a reference to Collision Chaos, which has cacti in the past. In addition, all CC timezones seem to depict trees in the background that may or may not be cacti... the graphics are ambiguous.

I believe Collision Chaos is supposed either the area with tall buildings in the south, or the island in the middle of the map. If so, it makes sense that they're near the cacti. The area with them would be the land depicted in CC's background.

 

That's brilliant! I thought about it, but didn't bother pulling up an image to actually look at it. But it's far more than just that statue... it's the blocks and such too!

I am convinced that this is likely (though we still don't know 100%) what this is: reused assets. Because it doesn't fit Wacky Workbench's theme *at all*. It was always strange to me, and I think this is a compelling reason for it existing.

Anyone know of a reliable Japanese contact to ask "hey, why is this thing in Wacky Workbench anyway???"?

 

This really blew my mind, so I went google searching and stumbled upon a thread on TSS forum discussing this very topic from the year 2011! Crazy. https://board.sonicstadium.org/topic/6592-sonic-cd-beta-lost-levels/?do=findComment&comment=383442

 

Since this is a thread about R2 I think this is a good opportunity to bring up somethings that I brought up from this other thread here:
https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...ave-left-on-the-list.40033/page-2#post-979336
I’ll write about it here too but the gist of it is that there was an avoidance to talk about R2 from some of the developers which makes me wonder why they can’t in the first place. Masato Nishimura had found some specification documents for CD (which makes me also wonder if some of this CD concept art in Origins came from these documents) and shared about his discovery over on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/1251400918370676737

https://archive.ph/0pQ3w
Someone asked him if there was anything about R2 in those documents and he said there was but that he was not able to speak about it anymore:
https://twitter.com/Mazin__/status/1251729842552225792

https://archive.ph/l9u1m

Apparently from the “Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works” book there was an interview with Kazuyuki Hoshino who also didn’t want to say anything about this zone. This is what someone wrote about in another thread:

From that same thread another user said they came in contact with Naoto Ohshima who had a similar response about this:

In my previous comment I said that they perhaps genuinely did not know anything about R2 but that was a very poor way of trying to explain all of this. I think they all still just have to keep confidentiality about the development of these games (even after all these years) because that is just how the Japanese gaming industry is like. They probably can't say anything without getting permission from SEGA.

By the way, this may be a definite stretch but in the 510 prototype Wacky Workbench used a blue palette for the past stages:

https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_t...type;_1993-05-10)/Comparisons/Wacky_Workbench
This means that the little section with the angel statue is also blue too which makes it look closer to the way R2 looked in the ending animation since it also had a blue coloring to that stage:

Animation certainly does take a long time and Hisashi Eguchi (credited as the chief key animator) has said in a Twitter thread that the entire process took about 4 months to do:
https://twitter.com/eguchi_1203/status/1300402825285873664

https://archive.ph/ADsNR
Here is the part where he says it:

https://archive.ph/ADsNR#selection-4651.0-4660.0
Translated via DeepL:

The reference sheets for the animations that were never before seen that are in Origins thankfully have dates on them. They have 1992.7.22 written on them so at the earliest the animations could have started being made in July 1992. I will use a spoiler tag since the image is very large:

Spoiler: CD Animation Sheet

With the 4 months Eguchi has said then that means they could have finished at the very least in November 1992 which I suppose could have been just enough time for the animations to then become digitized for the Sega CD so it could be shown off at the Sega World event one month later in December 1992 where it would be a part of the 0.02 build:
https://segaretro.org/Yuusei_Sega_World

https://hiddenpalace.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_CD_(Dec_4,_1992_prototype)

I just realized why has no one asked Nishimura himself (@Mazin__) about this since he seems to be the one who has revealed the most about CD's development.

 

Can’t you just check the room in the prototype with the blue palette, or was it not there yet?

By the way, I wonder who was responsible for R2. Each stage was handled by someone else, no?

I can’t imagine how your level being scrapped would feel. Or maybe it wasn’t personal like that.

 

No, I don't think this is a stretch at all! It could be that Wacky Workbench Past was chosen for the easter egg since it's past palette was so similar to R2's at some point, but when the palette changed they didn't bother moving the statue to another Round. Hence the rather eye-piercing lime palette in the final game, which is quite out of place for a statue plus some ruins now that I think about it.

 

I was just thinking as I thought about it more... and I could just be wrong about R2 in the drawing looking like a construction zone... but the fact that Wacky Workbench, certainly in it's past form, looks an awful lot like a factory under construction seems interesting to me. Perhaps much of the art in Wacky Workbench could have been borrowed from R2?

Now that might be a stretch.

 

Duke of Palletes on Twitter made not too long ago a quite convincing mock-up using those same assets as well as design cues from R2s concept art. So far, it's what I feel is a very close idea of what R2 might have looked like in 1993.

One thing worthy of interest however, is in the newest concept art from Sonic Origins, R2 is depicted with having tall trees and canopies along its above-ground sections. Makes me wish we could have just a few more glimpses of concept art and resources as to what this zone entailed. Slowly but surely the pieces seem to be coming together.

 

I'm not convinced the rainbow waterfalls sketch was actually fully intended to go into R2. I think it was just one of possibly dozens of ideas sketched out for it, like the many ones Craig Stitt made for Sonic 2. It's just too rough to be a more "proper" piece of concept art.

As for what the map shows, it has some other curiosities related to it.

Spoiler: Big Image

1. Collision Chaos originally had water, apparently (unless I missed it in the game).
2. Tidal Tempest is depicted as having grass in its above-ground section, just like every zone before it.
3. The whole layout makes it seem like the Rounds had smooth transitions similar to Sonic 3.
4. Wasn't there supposed to be an R9? Final Fever? Is that what "Boss" is? Weirdly, that's the only boss listed.

 

It'd have to have been basically all the months in advance

I'll never be able to explain this but this looks exactly like a stage that Sonic CD would have if it was made in 2022.