New Sonic 2 development lore drop - Genocide/Cyber City palette and art!

I just had a little check

At this location in the Simon Wai prototype, this wouldn't be a problem. The level was adjusted later.

This may be the case with other locations in the game - someone will have to check.

EDIT: just did - I don't think there would be any problems. Although you'd still need the green cogs for the platforms that keep going left or right (like the one at the end of act 3).

 

Everything of obvious value (in regards to Sonic 2) is now on the wiki. It may not all be annotated and explained properly, but there are hundreds of members of this board and wiki access is free - jump in and fix things:

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit)/Development
Is the main page with most of the things, including all we know of Genocide City Zone.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit)/Development/Metropolis Zone
There was so much Metropolis I gave the Zone its own sub-page. I would be floored if any level in any Sonic game had as much history of its development put in the public domain. There is so much here, to the point where you can practically draw up a timeline of every pixel in the Zone. It's kind-of insane.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (16-bit) scrapped enemies
We've probably doubled the amount of scrapped enemy concepts. Granted, a lot of it doesn't come close to being game-worthy, but there are at last five or six that do. The problem is most of these ideas weren't dreamt up by Hirokazu Yasuhara, so they had very little chance of ever making it into the game.

Of these Ball, Bubbler, Snail and Stegway had a lot of work put into them. Obviously we knew this to some degree because they had code attached at various points, but there's just as much effort on show here as Tom's enemies that did make it into the game, Buzzer and Masher. Maybe even more so, since those were effectively reskins of Sonic 1 enemies.

Tom also went on a skiing trip in the summer of 1992. I only point this out because it keeps turning up in the documents. I bet the Japanese staff were thrilled.


Speaking of which, while we might still be able to prise information from Brenda Ross or Craig Stitt, it appears the vast majority of the decision making was done by Hirokazu Yasuhara and Yasushi Yamaguchi. You probably know this already, but we didn't know this 20 years ago when some of the interviews were made, and reading them back today... it's not a great look for the community. Ignorance isn't a crime, but... let's just say if it were to happen again, we might want to get our house in order.


The tier list is as follows:

1) Yuji Naka was lead programmer, lord of the dance and the gatekeeper of everything. He had his finger in every pie - any producers or directors named above him in the credits were not hands-on.

2) Hirokazu Yasuhara was the only "planner" (lead designer), and effectively created the game without "creating" the game. He helped invent the broad concepts and likely designed the layout of every level in-game. You want to know what the grand plans were, he's the man to ask.

3) Yasushi Yamaguchi was the lead artist. His job was to turn Yasuhara's vague concepts into things you see on the screen. Yamaguchi is repsonsible for the look of the game - it all went through him... and he also did most of the art, because it appears others weren't as consistently good.

4) There's the Japanese "Zone artists" Jina Ishiwatari and Rieko Kodama who I'm going to guess were great at their jobs. They also had the same roles with Sonic 1 and likely just "got on with things".

5) And then there's the Americans, Tom Payne, Craig Stitt and Brenda Ross who... survived. 2/3rds of them made content that got into the game, but you can tell they were struggling, and by not living in constant crunch mode, were probably not delivering the same value for money as the Japanese. I get the impression one or more of them weren't even interested that much in video games, let alone the wider plans for Sonic 2, but they speak English and were on the front line, so obviously we're more likely to get information from them.


But yes, most mysteries will be solved by Yasuhara and Yamaguchi. As far as dead levels go, I'd say Yamaguchi is the one to ask - did he ever get the instruction to work on any of them?

 

An excellent summary.

Truth be told, I question how many more mysteries even remain. The "Winter Zone" is likely at least one iteration of Rock Zone (as documents have apparently stated?), and it's doubtful (though as those whole venture proved not 'impossible') that many more digitizer art assets exists if SEGA themselves never preserved it. Fan creations remain the best hope to ever see functional playable versions of these stages, and even 'those' have existed in some capacity for 20 years now, so the only issue is attempting to make them more accurate. Brenda, Craig and Tom have turned over their materials, so that part of the search at an end, with maybe a small chance that Craig uncovers some more later on his own time.

I do think the Brenda Ross interview will hold some extra value if/when it happens, but as has been said before, we're lucky she ever spoke on the topic again. If Frank produces the interview, we'll see what it yields. My hope is that the success of the mini-documentary he produced at least helps her feel a bit of extra pride about her old art, and that gives her some peace about her work during those years. It's certainly inspired members of the Sonic community to create interesting variations over the past 30 years.

Yamaguchi is quite open and active on his twitter. Arguably one of the most active of the devs, but like any other JPN dev, it's impossible to say how much info he's willing (or even still has) to give up. He's been very kind in his responses the past year, but he very much picks and chooses when/if he responds. The good news is there should be at least one more Beep21 interview arriving in the coming months, so that alone may reveal a lot. I have no idea how much Yashuhara responds to questions, if at all. He, to me, is one of the most important members of the classic sonic era, but he moved on a very long time ago and hasn't done nearly as much in gaming in recent years. He's never returned to the franchise even when Ohshima did, and I think his loss remains a key reason we've struggled to get a game that precisely matches the classics outside of Mania and (to a lesser extent) Superstars.

In truth, how much more unseen content can/should even exist for the game? I'm very skeptical that Blue Ocean got any digitized art, for example. Rock World having 2 different iterations may be something that was on paper only, or as I've said above, the unknown Brenda artwork from the tape may (or may not) be Sonic 2 related. The assets used in that piece are 100% Sonic related, even if they were mixed with new assets for another game (and apparently Kid Chameleon), but if Brenda herself doesn't address the piece, it's a speculative dead end at best. I wouldn't be surprised if no one at all can even recall what the ideas for 2 different iterations of "Rock World Zone" even were.

Honestly, we're getting a lot of closure on the development history of this game at long last. The rabbit hole did indeed go much deeper than we suspected 20 years ago, but we're nearing the end of that journey. Only so much more material can exist for this game, and every crucial member has spoken up on it fairly openly now, at least once in some capacity.

 

It's always unlikely we'll uncover new pieces of the puzzle, but these things have a habit of turning up anyway. See: the Harmony scans on Sega Retro.

I'm going to guess Brenda has some things to say/show (otherwise why follow up on that lead?), but the rest... ehh. I can see bits of Sonic 2 development coming out of the woodwork when Sega have a new compilation to sell, but we might have exhausted the supply of detailed, archival quality scans. But if people are motivated, who knows what might happen.

 

Our only solace is to scan our magazines at 1800dpi and hope there's a microscopic secret code hidden inside page 24 of Beep! Megadrive that no ones seen before

for legal reasons I must preface that was a joke. Don't overscan your magazines, folks

 

There is at least one prototype that we haven't found yet: whatever build is used in the Mean Machines Issue 1 promo video. It's between the August 21st and the September 14th prototypes, with the layout and enemy placement in Chemical Plant Zone being from the former, but Tails' AI seems to match the latter prototype. It doesn't seem like much, but a lot happened to the game between those two prototypes, so there could be some interesting stuff in there. Maybe.

(There's also footage from a World of Illusion prototype that predates both of the prototypes we have.)

 

There's also allegedly some point in development where they added Sand Shower's assets to the game, and then ended up deleting it and replacing it with Wood Zone because they didn't like how it flowed.

Whether such a build of the game can ever be found however is likely the same probability as the S1 Tokyo Toy Show build.

 

I agree otherwise, but there's one person that both of you have forgotten about - Masato Nakamura. We know that he was given a piece of concept art for each zone that he composed music for, many of which we've probably never seen before.

Not only could such pieces (or even just Nakamura's verbal descriptions of them) shed light on some of the zones that we only know the names of, but they could also give us a definitive answer to which tracks were meant for which zones.

 

There is another thing that given the documents we now have, doesn't make much sense.

Metropolis Act 3.

Specifically, this idea that Genocide City became Metropolis 3. The working assumption was that Genocide City was one Act... but we have maps for three Acts:
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:TomPaynePapers_Level_Maps_(Loose,_No_Order)_image1266.jpg
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:TomPaynePapers_Level_Maps_(Loose,_No_Order)_image1265.jpg
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:TomPaynePapers_Level_Maps_(Loose,_No_Order)_image1264.jpg

and not a single one of them bears any resemblence to Metropolis.

So where does the connection come from? The Sonic Jam Official Guide - someone translated it before we had proper scans, and a whole narrative was made from it:

I think this might be a misleading translation:
https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SonicJamOfficialGuide_Book_JP.pdf&page=51

I'm not a Japanese speaker, but I fed this into a couple of online tools and I'm not super sure it says what we thought it said. But you tell me - there's certainly no explicit mention of Genocide City.

Tom was asked about this in 2009:

"combined some elements into Metropolis level 3" is not "recycled a map". And I'm not sure that happened anyway (unless it's the idea that once upon a time, graphics would be recycled).


Given we have maps for Metropolis 3 going back quite a bit... I'm thinking the Sonic Jam guide might be referring to something completely different, or is making stuff up. Food for thought.

 

Could it be possible metropolis had 3 acts during planning and was scrapped, but later after the final round of zone cuts they decided to bring it back?

Metropolis would have been zone five based on internal zone id, while gcz/ccz would have been 15. Both would be the last zone in there section of the game. Might be related to that.

 

See my initial theory prior to all of this dropping was that the quote was related to Cyber CIty and Yuji was technically telling the truth. The team liked the idea of a three Act regular Zone finale, Cyber City wasn't looking too hot in terms of progress, so what was done for Cyber City Act 3 was just 'carried over' to Metropolis and worked on further as the deadline approached (hence it not really resembling the layouts we had - like they decided to re-do it from scratch to fit the Sonic 2 standards).

...The issue is that the dates brought up kinda kill credibility to that idea if I have everything straight? It seems Metropolis Act 3 always existed prior to it being inserted into the Simon Wai build. So I really dunno.

Going by Tom's quote in the above interview, it almost sounds like they were trying to find things from Cyber City to shove into the Act? So maybe the Jam guide quote was referring to trying to find a place for the objects designed for Cyber City, so Act 3 of Metropolis felt more 'unique'?

...The issue there is that the Rhombus elevator thingy for Act 3 that didn't make the cut
was seemingly always planned for that area anyways.

I'm still curious when exactly the '2 Act system' was adopted over Sonic 1's 3 Act system. It still seems like they wanted Cyber CIty to have 'more' content than the average Zone at one point.

 

Might be on to something, perhaps in Metropolis Act 3, there was supposed to be a TV screen (a flickering object) that the camera looks at before panning up to Sonic's position on top of the level?

 

Something humorous I can't stop thinking in hindsight now is that when Tom is talking about the map for "the Genocide City Zone" in that 2009 interview, we know now that he is referring to the 3 acts encompassing whole 'zone', and yet since there was no clarification of it being one act or three we just skipped right by such a big revelation all that time ago.

Also something in that Naka quote that still makes it all so confusing is that last part about not wanting to waste a 'map'. I think the clarification of a map gives the implication its a full stage layout and not just general gimmicks or something. Atleast that's how I read it.

But at this point it's clear its not exactly as straight forward as that so its weird.

 

Oh believe me, I started to. I'm getting burnt out on Genocide though. This is what I've played with so far.



it does look like it would have been a pretty decent level swap. There's a bit of guess work in there of course but it was all sourced from either spinball/bbomb or traced over from "bob". Anyone can feel free to continue on this if they want.

EDIT:

I also might note, that many of these tiles were clearly made for a "swap" in mind. For example, the cog wheel that is just one 128x128 chunk itself is made up of entirely different and independent pieces/art than the others.

Along with the background being seperated, as if there may have actually been two seperate backgrounds but merged into one once the decision to drop Genocide City was made. I'm assuming one or the other would have looked different with the art swapping (which might also explain the randomness of some of it).

 

Okay, so Naka said that Metropolis Act 3 was once a single act zone that was cut due to story reasons. This cannot be Genocide City, since it had three unique acts that did not resemble MZ3 in the slightest.

Hidden Palace is a cut zone that was meant to have only a single act (at one point) and story significance, but there's no way that it's the mystery zone that we're looking for, especially since we have numerous prototype builds where both zones coexist.

What if Naka's zone was either the original, full version of Death Egg or perhaps Neo Death Egg?

 

I honestly think its a language/term barrier thing, and he may have meant they didn't want to waste the "slot" or idea of the three act "final" zone. My guess is that this decision may have came before Sky Chase and Wing fortress were conceived.

 

The fact the Simon Wai proto has 3 acts for Metropolis yet its level select places it early in the campaign and still lists GCZ suggests that the decision to give the former 3 acts was made before they scrapped GCZ and moved MZ to the end.

This is supported by the fact said screen still uses the name "Genocide City", suggesting that they coined its updated name "Cyber City" and created its concept art after they designed that screen, which they wouldn't have done unless they were still planning to implement GCZ/CCZ.


So perhaps the reason MZ received another act was that they felt it be overwhelming for the player to have to go through three acts of GCZ and then two acts of DEZ (and possibly another level/boss after that for the "final battle in space") in a row, so they decided to move the 3-act gimmick to MZ for balance?

MZ was supposed to go between Sand Shower and Tropical Sun, so a 3-act Eggman base would have been less overwhelming there.

Might be why they came up with Sky Chase. After they scrapped GCZ and moved MZ to the end, they added SCZ to give players a break.

 

Do we have any concrete ideas for this "final battle in space" by the way? Something on that first Super Sonic concept page intrigues me.

Notice the Death Egg Robot towering over skyscrapers like a kaiju, in what I assume is also its first concept drawing. Perhaps it was originally meant to be much larger and you'd fight him in the skyline above Genocyber City and/or around the Neo Death Egg? I could see how that could be interpreted as "in space", especially considering the page already has weird translations like "medieval times".

Also I just realized the second movie was probably referencing this concept and that's just adorable.

 

Well, according to the timeline document "the last battle in space" is actually set in the past. After the player completes the future section the (Neo) Death Egg warps to the past. It's in there that the final battle takes place, the DE is finally knocked down and the timeline is restored.

So it wouldn't make sense for "the last battle in space" to be set in or over Genocide City, which only exists in the future. But it can still take place in/around the Death Egg, or in space ala The Doomsday.

 

3&K actually does involve fighting an absolutely gigantic Death Egg robot. I wonder if that was the original idea for S2.

The more S2 is studied, the more I worry a romhack or fangame restoring the original vision will end up looking far too similar to 3&K.