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

But the baseline from the present theme is in the power mix in a style that clearly matches the bad future styles of the other tracks. There's more to this story.

It's entirely possible the bad/good future tracks were never finished. Maybe early demos were composed when the stage was cut off. It's also possible that bass baseline was used in the power mix (it clearly is from R2) to represent the stage merely by taking from the present theme, but that's an odd choice when you consider how the rest of the track is composed.

I am not surprised if the other tracks were never fully finished. They would have been used elsewhere in the OST if they were finished in a way considered satisfactory, but again, I do not believe it's as simple as stated. The existence of the Past redbook Salad Plain theme alone proves there can be a more complicated history behind the development of this OST. We're still missing a few small pieces at least.

Or, the more unfortunate truth could simply be that the present track is the only one they have that survived? Without another existing beta, nothing else may be left. Part of the problem is that unlike other builds we're after, we've never seen any build that used R2 at all in magazines or other media. Virtually every other major beta we've found could be traced by finding old magazine scans.

Regardless, I think those current fanmade tracks are very good approximations for what we would have gotten. If that's the closest we'll ever get, it's a well informed guess and they are good songs regardless.

 

That's why I think his statement should be interpreted more to mean "only the present music was finished and released publicly", as I find it hard to believe they wouldn't recycle the other tracks if they were considered "up to par".

But, again, I also don't know if we should just assume that bad future/good future/past tracks were never worked on at all. It's certainly possible (R2 was cut relatively early in development), but I don't want to write that off entirely given other evidence we had.

The same is true with the rest of the stage's assets. We don't have any evidence of digitized stage graphics ever having been implemented into any existing build, but that doesn't mean more concept art with the zone's visual style didn't exist. It also doesn't mean those assets were never drawn or digitized either. We didn't know about the boss and enemy sprites for 18 years until one of us finally worked on the game officially (Taxman in 2011). I personally think the chances of finding more digitized art are pretty low at this stage (though stranger things have happened like Tom giving us B-Bomb art assets just recently for what almost certainly was used from Genocide/Cyber City), and another beta build with R2 may literally not exist anymore, but just one or 2 more pieces of concept art would fill in the gaps.

I'll repeat what I said one last time. The community should respectfully find a way to request more of these documents be uncovered, if at all possible. There's enough demand for it that SEGA could even have financial incentives to publish more art or concepts in titles like Origin Plus (as the Origins discovery was the reason for starting this discussion), or new development books. CD gets a 30th anniversary later this year. SEGA could release a new artbook based on this game alone to celebrate it. CD is a fun and unique little piece of gaming history that deserves to be uniquely celebrated.

All of these avenues should be considered and encouraged. It's worked in the past, let's make sure we're not leaving any stone unturned.

 

I think even if there was no Good/Bad Future theme was officially composed, the other mixes still point to good hints of what his take on the Future Mixes would have contained, I.E. His composer intent.

Also, I was looking over the beta releases we had in a bit more detail, and I find the history of the past tracks a bit more interesting. The v.02 demo has a redbook past theme that's unique, while later betas (like 510) do not have the past themes at all (likely because they were in the process of figuring out how to do them without using redbook tracks). It makes for an interesting case of how early some of these assets were developed. Were all tracks composed by early 93? Were all redbook past tracks made?

Do we know precisely when development started in 1992? The Late December v0.02 beta, and the existence of completed animation, makes me think more of the game was in active development in 1992 than you'd previously think. We know Naoto had his own team working in Japan separately from Naka's the STI S2 team, but what is the earliest point the game could have been under active development? The Toei animations may have already been completed by that stage (late 1992), as the intro is fully present in the early beta.

In short, my brain always thought of the game as a product of 1993, when most of it was more likely visualized and conceptualized in 1992, long before R2 was actually cut (somewhere between Dec 92 and May 93). I'd love to see more insight into that 1992 time period.