Sonic 2 Original Music Allocations

I think I made a discovery.

For the Simon Wai Prototype, if you get more than 100 rings, it plays a sped up variant of Death Egg's music

If you then go to ID 10, which is implied to be Death Egg, music is cut off, but can be retrieved if you obtain 100 rings and die, which then removes the lack of music for the zone.

I know this might seem obvious but I feel like it's worth noting anyways since this proves that Death Egg's music was supposed to be intended for it's respective zone in the Simon Wai Proto.

For my thoughts on why the track is so long, it seems to me that, coming from concept art of the Death Egg, it was supposed to go on for far longer and inherent traits of Wing Fortress. Making the length of the song neccessary.

That also explains why Sky Chase Zone was added in last minute, since not only is it's conception nowhere to be seen during this state of development (besides music which was used in slot 09 for Rock World/Winter), but also because it's quite literally an autoscroller with a samey background of clouds, making it easiest to implement in the smallest amount of time.

 

This honestly doesn't work. The Simon Wai prototype plays $88 for 1up sound logic (which is the correct song/value in S1 but not here), and it wasn't updated for the proper placement ($98) until the September 14th build. Plus doing the listed trick there and letting the music and death take its course leads to the driver malfunctioning and refusing to update for other songs.

 

Ah, understandable.

 

because it's slow and plodding, and the Masa's Demo version has it end in a way that implies it's slow and plodding because it's meant for a cutscene that is, it is actually like, outright the only non-credits or non-jingle track in the demo OST to actually have an ending - the rest all loop and fade out.

WHY DID I NEVER NOTICE THIS

this is absolutely what I suspect too, Sonic 2's development had stuff change so often that it wouldn't surprise me if the purpose of the track (for the dev team) changed even as Masa was writing it. I'm also not really under the impression that Masa had re-wrote anything in response to dev changes either, because of how close the demo tracks were to the transcribed proto versions. it seemed to be a one and done thing that got repurposed for a game whose vision was constantly and rapidly changing.


re: with regards to demo tempos, I had never seen anything outright stating that the demos are slower for easier transcription, it was a guess I had made based on how the demos, proto transcriptions, and final transcriptions had their tempos go. wouldn't surprise me if others had made similar guesses too, but personally I had never seen anything anywhere talking about it.