An analysis on the Sonic series' casinos and their real world inspirations

I have to ask, what's with the series' weird thing for occasionally combining casinos with forests and jungles? Collision Chaos, Casino Forest. Even the final Spring Yard has trees and greenery in the background, and "yard" in its name.

 

I don't think either Collision Chaos nor Spring Yard Zone are forests or jungles. Collision chaos looks like a coastal/river city, pretty much exactly like what Lake Charles, LA looks like which is home to a few huge major casinos albeit with neon signs everywhere. Spring Yard Zone looks like a modern city park with small shrubs, which are called yards occasionally:



You can gamble at gaming halls from this area of South Houston.

 

Some cities have a lot of greenery in them too - Berlin for instance (which I returned from after being there for two weeks) has a lot of greenery, straight up has woods in the middle of the city (tiergarten), among many other parks and huge trees just lining the streets and buildings.

 

Collision Chaos has grass, trees and plants, what appears to be frog eggs, and a BG full of greenery.

And to add to the confusion, it's supposedly "A bunch of pinballs floating atop the water"

So I guess it's a drifting pinball jungle island

 

The "Yard" part of Spring Yard and the bit of greenery in the background probably made the Sonic CD devs lean into the "green" aspect of it more so than the level it took inspiration from. I've never read Collision Chaos as a forest, but now thinking about it, I can't fault anyone for interpreting it that way, a lot of the background is dedicated to a big autumnal forest, and there's actual grass tiles as part of the level structure.

Spring Yard though, I see it as just a city with some greenery. Maybe it could be that the level itself is a city park mixed in with a "pinball park" after they had to change the background, they changed the Zone name and then had this strange city park/pinball park idea with the pun of Spring Yard (as in plants) with Spring Yard (as in the springs Sonic bounces off of).

 

Er, frog eggs in collision chaos? I don't recall those. But either way, I listed two swamp climates which have casinos in them, so that's precisely in line with how you describe CCZ, we definitely have frogs around houston and lake charles.

 

These breakables




Also present in Meta Junglira, decidedly a jungle zone:

 

I'd argue that Casinopolis in Sonic Adventure (at the least the exterior) is based exclusively on the Fremont Street Experience in Vegas. I've never personally been to Vegas but you can see in some images where there are similarities with the Fremont casinos in particular.

As stated by the OP in the 2nd post, the 4 Queens Casino bares a striking resemblance to the entrance area for Casinopolis:


Right across from 4 Queens is Sam Boyd's Fremont Casino which keeps with the same theme, lending the red and yellow visuals of Casinopolis in SA. Station Square's Casinopolis combines both the gold crown from 4 Queens and the red stripes from Sam Boyd's for the illuminated part of the sign:



The Pioneer Club (now a gift shop I believe), also based in Fremont has similar architecture. While the angles are inverted, the windows & columns are similar:


And just behind the huge cowboy, a huge cowgirl, of Glitter Gulch. More evidence that SA's Casinopolis is based on this particular part of Vegas:



The Golden Nugget, also based in Fremont. The arches and the textures used on them are pretty much taken straight from this casino:


I think it's safe to say the exterior is based on the 'old part of Vegas', while some remnants in the stage itself (the MGM lion, pirate ships etc) are based more on modern Vegas. I am hazarding a guess at that though, since I don't know exactly where these places are in Vegas (the strip, I assume).

 

no I think that's all accurate. when I was replaying Sonic Adventure last year I got to remember in real time the way the interior of the stage called out more than a few famous Strip casinos (as previously detailed by Jaxer).

the exterior stuff I didn't know about at all! I basically never ventured to the old downtown area at all growing up, it was considered Bad News at the time.

 

This image better explains Casinopolis' inspirations: