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

Speaking of that, are there still any pieces of art left unidentified in that MTV program?

We obviously don't have clear scans of this one, the winter level one or the Sky Sanctuary one, but are the rest of them all just recolors of Sonic 2 art that we have access to? Are any pieces of art in that clip skimmed past so quickly that it's impossible to get a good look at them?

And on the topic of previous games inspiring Superstars, I don't think that Arzest not having access to some mythical vault of Sonic concept art proves anything. Maybe Ohshima just remembered some old ideas of his and decided to add them into the game. This obviously wouldn't include any Sonic 2 concepts, though. That Onix-esque "Doomsday" dragon does not look like either Super Trip or the final boss, I agree, but here's how it's depicted in the Mushroom Hill concept art:



Looks a lot more like the Superstars dragons, and is even shown breathing fire it seems. It reminds me of Eggman's dragon doodle from the intro cutscene, actually.

 

Ohshima didn't work in Sonic 3. He was in Japan while Sonic Team was making S3 in the States. He wouldn't know about the dragon boss and its mural from 1st hand experience.

Besides, we know that Sega still has the S3 zone concept art, as they've released some of it, and showed more of it in an expo of sorts in Japan IIRC.

No, I think all points to the Superstars devs getting the dragon idea from old development material. Just like they got Golden Capital and Sonic the Rabbit.

 

*reads comments*

This is how rumors get started. You don't know what you don't know.

 

What? It's not like I'm making unfounded guesses. I'm stating facts and analyzing them.

We know Sega still has the S3 zone concept art, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to show some of it in recent years.

We know that the dragon was depicted in one of them, and the mural in the Mushroom Hill sketch, from looking at them.

We know that Ohshima didn't work in Sonic 3 nor was present during its development, so he wouldn't have memories of the original dragon boss plans. So if the dragon boss + mural in Superstars were inspired by the S3 concept, he would have had to get it from somewhere.

 

Where did the "Sonic 3 had a dragon for a final boss" thing come from? While I don't necessarily doubt it, if it's merely from that one blurry, standard-definition screenshot of mid-development footage, then that's just not a lot to go on. That could be anything. Every time I see it, it looks like more level art to me. While I love the effort going into this mystery, this is just more hypothesizing along the lines of "Sonic CD had a desert level because there's a couple of cactuses on the Little Planet map!" when for all we know it could have been put there merely for decoration.

If there's more evidence than that one shot, I'm all ears. Er, eyes. You know what I mean.

 

IIRC there's a mention of a dragon egg or some shit in the JP Sonic 3 manual, which Adventure made to reference Chaos.

 

...Hm.
Looking at the art again... I can't frickin' decide. I could see level art. I could see a dragon. I could see a snake, ala that one QTE in Forces.

 

A dragon is depicted on one of those clairvoyant murals in Sonic 3's zone progression concept art Jaxer just referenced. 3's Japanese manual makes reference to not only a dragon egg but also a legendary god of Angel Island who wiped out a former, power-hungry civilization. Presumably 3&K's original story would've involved Eggman inadvertently summoning the Doomsday dragon through his own power-hungry abuse of the Master Emerald, forcing Super Sonic to clean up after him.

 

There was a suggestion that the planned Sonic 2 map, showing an island, was the same or similar to the one in the 8-bit Sonic 1. This one:





Because Green Hill Zone is in a similar place, and Jungle Zone is where Wood(s) Zone is or whatever. I was going to challenge, since the differences are pretty radical, but given the theory didn't pick up much steam, I guess I didn't need to.

However I came across this:


This is Landstalker's map (as a physical model!), a game in development at around the same time as Sonic 2. Volcano/mountain and the back, bay of water at the front - for this to come up (independently?) in video games three times in the space of a year, I figured I should ask - is this design based on a real life location? Or some anime doing the rounds at the time?

I'm working on the assumption that it this was just a coincidence, but it would be interesting if it wasn't.

 

Sprite map, for comparison :



Personnally, I think it's just a basic island shape.

 

If it's mere coincidence, then, I guess, that's because the designer/artist wanted to be accurate and add depth to the world, rather than just draw a hill surrounded by water. If not, that's interesting!

 

Huh. I always figured the Landstalker island's look was loosely inspired by Koholint Island, given the game's Zelda influence. But now that you mention, it does look closer to the S2 island. How curious...

If the similarity between the S1SMS and S2 maps wasn't a coincidence, then I imagine the inconsistencies stem from the S2 devs tweaking the island to accommodate the planned zones.

Like, they wanted to have a desert zone and a pyramid for warp point (or is that supposed to be Metropolis as suggested by Jaxer?), so they expanded the island to the east and put a desert and pyramid there.

I also would assume that the reasoning behind using that layout wasn't being consistent with S1SMS. Rather, the game was maybe going to be set in South Island initially (going by the Emerald Hill being called Green Hill), so they based the S2 map on the preexisting South Island map rather than starting from scratch. They probably didn't care that much about consistency with S1SMS, seeing how it wasn't the "main" version of Sonic 1 and wasn't made by them.

 

@Blue Spikeball Agreed, I'm more intrigued by the Landstalker map, though. What a weird reference that would be.

 

Speaking of the maps, there's one important thing that we need to remember: They are not to scale. If they were, then either the mountains would be tiny or the trees would be massive.

Certain geographical details, such as the aforementioned trees, have been given exaggerated proportions, presumably to clarify which zone is located in their place. Of course Emerald Hill goes where the palmtrees are, that's why they're drawn so distinctly.

However, an important detail that all of us forgot pretty quickly is that the zone name labels are separate pieces of paper. I can't remember which one of us discovered it, but they're clearly not drawn on the picture.

This explains why some of the zone placements don't make sense; There's no oil in Oil Ocean, there's no tropical scenery at Tropical Plant and there's no casino in Casino Night. The locations of these zones must've been chosen later, perhaps by people who didn't actually draw the maps.

My theory is that the maps were drawn first with no direction other than "What would an island with various different biomes look like through different time periods?", presumably to inspire ideas for level themes. Afterwards, level themes were chosen, some of which were inspired by the maps, while others were just a result of the developers spitballing ideas. The ruined future of Back to the Future Part II notably has toxic waste reclamation facilities and an enormous casino hotel as its centerpieces, so adding both to Sonic 2's ruined future might've seemed obvious, even though they were not present on the future map. And even though the past map depicts Green Hill's spot as a coastal area with palmtrees, perhaps a developer thought that a mountaintop setting with pine trees would help distinguish this palette swap level from its present counterpart.

And that's why the island maps were completely redesigned for the timeline documents, to better represent all the zones that are going to be added.

Again, this is just my theory.

 

There is also the fact Hill Top is partly set in a volcano, but in the map there are no volcanoes in that spot. The only possible volcano appears to be on the tallest mountain to the north.

Also worth nothing that the second past map depicts Hill Top as being more mountaneous:


Perhaps that map was created later, when they had a better grasp of the zones? Would explain why Tropical Sun has a different name here from the other past map. They changed its name between the creation of the two maps.

Still no volcano or pine trees though.

 

I mean, doesn't the tsunami flood map resemble the timeline's past map a lot closer? Not to mention that "Tropical Summer" resembles the name "Tropical Sun" a lot more than "Tropical Plant", which was probably the level's oldest name. If I had to guess, this zone was meant to be the past counterpart to Chemical Plant at one point, but plans for that were scrapped when they realized that there's pretty much no way to recolor assets made for an industrial waste management facility to suit a tropical coastal area or vice versa.

And if we're going by this logic, then maybe Blue Lake was changed into Blue Ocean when they realized how easy it'd be to reuse Ocean Wind assets in it.

 

Blue Lake = Azure Lake

 

While the names are basically synonymous, data in the 1103 Sonic 3 prototype shows Azure Lake didn't even have a lake in the background earlier in development, instead having flowery fields stretching all the way to the distant mountains. That, plus the lack of any actual water in the stage itself, makes me think the stage's final name is just a coincidence and that the stage derives from an unrelated concept.

 

So this giant egg-looking thing in the middle of Blue Lake Zone is supposed to be the Death Egg in its infancy, right? Or at least just some other thing Eggman is setting up in the past? Seems like the zone at that time would've had the same theme as Launch Base, with the under-construction Death Egg displacing a huge body of water. It could even be what's making that river that's flooding Olympus. Maybe Aquatic Ruin Zone was first meant to be a very water-damaged palace in the process of being ruined.

 

I feel like it's worth mentioning that an unused variation of the background for the Sonic the Hedgehog Level Creator from 2009 has structures that seem to resemble the domes in the Sonic 2 time travel maps. Make of that what you will.