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

If Neo Death Egg took place in the past, perhaps that finally explains Neo Green Hill's name and late level slot:
Neo Green Hill/Neo Death Egg/Final Battle in Space

Going through some ancient ruins before boarding the Death Egg then having a battle in space? Compare that to S3&K:
Sky Sanctuary/Death Egg/Doomsday

Heh, more and more it seems that S3&K really was the original Sonic 2 vision.

 

I bet we can confirm a lot of S2 mysteries if focused was shifted onto S3 mysteries

 

Green Hill zone was already in na prototype, they could have played around with bringing it back to save dev time.

 

Totally speculative and basically no evidence... and yet, very interesting. If the island was supposed to be South Island like in Sonic 1 (do we have confirmation on this point?), then it might be fitting to start out in Green Hill Zone. While I still think it was only a test level, given the time travel portion here as well, it actually doesn't sound too crazy.

 

It's pretty clear Emerald Hill's level art was always meant to be Sonic 2's version of Green Hill, with the Sonic 1 Green Hill being a leftover test map from before any of Sonic 2's level art had been completed. NA proto is extremely early, still using Sonic 1's level slots and music.

 

I'm not denying what your saying, but they went out of there way to reformat Green hills graphics for sonic 2 engine and implement dev code to switch just that stage to use sonic 1 Collison. (Code that won't work unless on a dev cart)
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(Genesis)/Nick_Arcade_Prototype/Zones
Most likely just for testing but it's still interesting

 

I'm not pushing an idea. I'm saying it's interesting and wouldn't be totally absurd if it was true.

But you said the Nick Arcade prototype is extremely early. But when did development actually begin? Because when you look at it, even though it's very incomplete, there was a *lot* of work that was done to it. Clearly it had been under development for many months by that point. I think I've heard it suggested that it started in January, maybe December. Who knows. But I think we take for granted the information we have at our disposal. But we really don't know as much as we sometimes would like to think we do. So I take some of the things we "know" with a small grain of salt.

 

The earliest date I've seen is 6th April:
https://info.sonicretro.org/File:To...llaneous_Loose_Pages_(No_Order)_image1453.jpg

Again, the Nick Arcade build was likely built for Summer CES 1992 on the 21st May, so I'd put money on the idea that Tom Payne was working on this project at least a month and a half before our earliest prototype. If you expect the higher ups on the food chain to have started before then, I think we're talking January/February 1992.

There are probably ways to work it out.

Sorry I lied - 30th March.

 

Something interesting about that second timeline, and I haven't really seen discussed, is that it mentions "Draw 2 mid level bosses" twice totaling to 4. Do we know anything about this specifically? Another eventual Sonic 3 holdover?

 

That was probably around the time Tom joined. But development had to have started before that. Even the Sonic 2 GG demo has the same title graphics, and that's from December.

 

If there's gonna be confirmation about the prototype used there, the images that some pesky journalist took without permission should help a bit. Here's an excerpt from the Mean Machines magazine issue 22.

And then in Sega Force Issue 7, the journalist confirms the music is the same as the previous game. And they dated the article as May 28, 1992. At least for the "latest" date the Nick Arcade build was made.

The next best thing would be to figure out the video tape recording date of that Nick Arcade show. But then again, I doubt it would have been earlier than the CES Summer 1992 event.

 

S3 didn't even achieve it's own vision and has arguably bigger mysteries than S2.

 

If we want to narrow the build date a little more, Tom Payne's calendar for May says "finished sandcrab" on May 4th. The Nick Arcade prototype does have that early art of Crawl in the ROM, so it had to have been built at some point on or after that date. I agree with Black Squirrel that it was likely built for Summer CES 1992, though.

This website and a couple others state that Season 2 of Nick Arcade filmed in June 1992, which lines up, but I don't know what their source for that is.

 

It doesn't look like he ever got time to draw them, if that counts. New Metropolis art was going into the game as late as August/September, so I guess that became the priority.

The only mid-boss I've read about is Mecha Sonic, back when Death Egg was proper level, but that was a Yamaguchi thing.

 

I like how this early Metropolis palette works with fg (bg disabled cuz there are a bit messy colours)

 

Looks like rusted copper

It actually fits pretty well with all the other copper coloured things in the level

 

100% Agree. To me the absolute biggest mysteries out there are the design evolution of Sonic 3 - it seems to me that there were very ambitious ideas around adopting a completely 3D gameplay early on and the failure of that concept to become workable in the crunched development timeframe led to reworking the abandoned Sonic 2 zones and story arc.

 

Honestly, I really wish that somebody would make a Sonic 2 beta -inspired fangame/hack like Sonic Overture; not a recreation of Sonic 2's early plans, but rather a completely original experience that uses all the early concepts as a foundation.

This would not only solve the initial problem of all "beta remakes" - the incorrect assumption that literally all scrapped elements of a game can be smoothly combined into a well-crafted, coherent experience, but also work as a justification for getting some things "wrong" - deviation is expected from tributes and homages, intentional or not.

And on the topic of Overture, which was set to be a Sonic 1 prequel, this hypothetical fangame would also make sense as a Sonic 2 prequel; Origins' cutscenes confirm that 2 takes place after CD, but only shows what happens after CD's good ending. CD's bad ending shows Eggman escaping with a single Time Stone, so that could explain all the time travel shenanigans.

 

I can't agree more with what you wrote

 

Ooh I hadn't spotted that Game Gear date. That's... curious.

This date comes from an internal string:
MS SONIC¥THE¥HEDGEHOG.2 Ver0.00 1991/12/05 Aspect Co.,Ltd

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this was probably a "project start date" rather than a build date. The earliest magazine coverage of Game Gear Sonic 2 is dated July 1992 and the shots we do have are from the AutoDemo (and one mockup). I'd place bets on the AutoDemo being another Summer CES 1992 thing, though we may need someone to dig to verify it didn't turn up sooner. The first non-AutoDemo build shows up in August/September.


Aspect's previous game, the Western version of Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe, has a 10th December 1991 date in its code... although given its title screen has a 1992 copyright, I'm not sure I trust that fully either. It's plausible that they finished Ax Battler then moved onto Sonic 2, and the AutoDemo represents about six month's worth of work (bearing in mind they started from scratch, unlike the Mega Drive version that built of Sonic 1).


EDIT: and I suppose the other indicator is this is a Game Gear ROM but the text reads "MS".