Sonic 2 Original Music Allocations

I appreciate the fact you actually based on your theories on tangible research so great kudos for that. You've done a better job here than the vast majority of posts on here. Unfortunately, you couldn't resist yourself by making what I call 'vibe judgments'. I don't believe at all that Oil Ocean Zone fits a desert theme better than Oil Ocean Zone. I personally believe it fits the orientalist trope of Arabs loving oil. You can see how much this stuff is a matter of personal perspective.

That said I found your post interesting and will read it carefully.

 

There's nothing wrong with vibe judgements used in moderation. Sometimes, in lieu of evidence, common sense is all you're left to rely on. Even without the mountain of evidence supporting it, it's pretty obvious Oil Ocean was composed for a desert level when you consider how ridiculous the notion is of Masa saying "Oh, Oil Ocean has oil, the Arabs have oil, I should make the theme arabic!" like, come on. No. Masa is a sane, rational human being who wouldn't make such leaps in logic when composing for a Sonic level. He saw industrial machinery, so he composed something with industrial sounds. That's as deep as it gets.

 

This is one Saudi Arabia oil plant:



The Oil Ocean music fits its assigned level.
Granted, it may also fit a desert themed level. But so far there is no evidence it was intended to.

EDIT: No, the internal level order doesn't match the internal music order. Why it should be in the first place?

EDIT2: SEGA even reiterated with Oil Desert zone and its music in S4:EpII

 

And this is a non-Arabian oil plant:

Seems pretty OOZ-esque to me.

Moreover, most of Arabia is a desert. Oil Ocean, on the other hand, is set above the sea -- it's even in its name.

Have to agree with DDubs that getting "Arabs" from OOZ feels like a stretch.

Internal music order matches the original level order in every other classic mainline Sonic game.

Which came long after OOZ got its association with Arabs through its final music.

 

I mean, the fact that it uses a completely different music track in the Simon Wai proto could be seen as evidence that the final track was actually composed for a different stage originally. See also Hidden Palace Zone using what became the Mystic Cave 2P music. Every other stage that's actually in some kind of playable state in that build uses the same track as in the final game, which does suggest the music allocations for stage slots with actual content at that point in development were intentional.

Though to play Devil's Advocate, I suppose Wood Zone is the outlier there - there's clearly the start of some content there (albeit very barebones), but it uses the same music as Metropolis Zone, which also exists with the correct music allocation in that build. However, I'd argue that it's also clearly not in a comparable state to Oil Ocean Zone or Hidden Palace Zone either - those have at least partial layouts with actual objects that are, to a degree, playable, whereas Wood Zone has no objects and only a tiny section of layout that can be actually accessed during 'normal' (e.g. non-debug mode) play. It almost seems like they may have only just been starting on translating the planned map into actual in-game chunks prior to the decision to cut the stage. Without access to more builds between Nick Arcade and Simon Wai, though, it's impossible to determine exactly what period of development the data in that slot originates from.

 

Oh for fuck's sake. I cannot believe this forum has been debating the same shit for 20 years.

Here is a list of evidence it was intended to:

1. The track was Casino Night 2P in almost every beta and only changed at the last minute, despite the music IDs being switched around multiple times, and despite the final Oil Ocean theme being in the game since the Wai build. The same cannot be said for the final Hidden Palace theme, which was added to the game very late.
2. By process of elimination, there simply isn't anywhere else Casino Night 2P fits based on all the beta material we've gotten, and putting it anywhere else would be based on literally nothing but vibes.
   
3. The final Oil Ocean theme just happens to have always occupied an unused slot for level 4, which just happens to perfectly line up with the concept maps showing a desert level as the fourth stage, which just happens to also perfectly line up with prototype internal level orders.
4. Many of the original concepts for Sonic 2 were reused for Sonic 3, which just happens to have an Arabian desert level, which just happens to have Arabian theme music.
5. The idea of Masa, a Japanese celebrity musician, thinking about Arabs when presented with the Oil Ocean concept in 1992, is patently absurd.
6. The idea of Masa thinking about Arabs when presented with the desert level concept is so obvious a connection that a child could make it.

If it were just one of these factors, I'd be willing to believe it was circumstantial, but all of them? Denying it at this point is as absurd to me as claiming the Earth is flat.

 

Beware of development snapshot deliveries. Remember, the S3 prototype slapped all of us in the face with the proto music.

The music fits an oriental desert (personal preference). You are right to say that Masa probably composed the music with that in mind (but we have no factual proof of this, don't underestimate the japanese people). Sand Shower zone (supposedly, because it is factually slot 03) played this music while OOZ played CNZ 2P in the prototypes (fact). However, the desert level was intended to be a western desert (fact). The western desert level was scrapped (fact). The music was finally assigned to OOZ (fact). All of this means: besides an oriental desert, it also fits an oil refinery better than the CNZ 2P theme.

 

Didn't expect people to get angry about the orientalist trope charge! I'm not making a moral claim. Its not a big deal. But the final game clearly uses Arabic sounding music for Oil Ocean. The most famous thing about Arab states in the 1990s and indeed today is their wealth derives from oil. Its not exactly an unknown or rare trope.

Every moderately well educated Japanese person would know this. They aren't stupid.

 

I otherwise agree there's enough evidence that Oil Ocean theme was supposed to play in Sand Shower, and the fact that we associate oil and UAE/Saudi Arabia could very well be a lucky or smart touch by the people who were relentlessly brainstorming where to put what after everything went to shit during production. Also I'm happy tp see you posting again.

But this point really sticks out. Why would it be absurd for a famous, wealthy, cosmopolitan minded man in Japan in the beginning of the '90s to think of Arab countries when presented with the concept of a stage about oil? The OPEC had been established 30 years before, the the 1973 oil crisis was about to be 20 years old already. It doesn't really sound absurd at all? If anything, almost half oil product imports to Japan came from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE in the wake of the very much broadcast Gulf War, and I'm sure anyone in Japan would be at least a bit aware of what happened in the world back then.

So I get saying Masa didn't directly do this association, but it doesn't sound like common sense at all to suggest he never could?

 

One question I have is let's say Oil Ocean was always supposed to be Casino Night 2 Player music. Why did they change it? Did they just suddenly decide the Sand Shower theme would be better for the Oil Ocean zone?

I always found this strange. With Emerald Ocean 2 Player and Mystic Cave 2 Player I understand - the level music was no longer used for a stage so they put it into 2 Player. But why didn't they put the final Oil Ocean into 2 Player if it was no longer used? Why change the Oil Ocean zone music for seemingly an arbitrary reason.

Maybe they thought the cut Sand Shower music would sound strange on Casino Night 2 player and I guess it would.

 

If half of Japan's oil comes from the Middle East than Oil Ocean possibly taking place in the desert is a sensible assumption and not just an "orientalist trope". Oil Ocean's heat wave-y orange background always screamed desert to me regardless.

 

They might have done it so that CNZ 2P had its own music, like the other 2P zones. It would have been weird if CNZ was the exception.

Or they just wanted to use as much music as possible so that it wouldn't go to waste, especially given Masato Nakamura's celeb status and how expensive the music commissioned from him was.

 

Maybe. But I think that nothing is wasted. They would have used the musics in other games.

 

Eh. We can't make that kind of judgement. We're all poisoned by thirty years of associations between Oil Ocean, deserts and the Persian scale. A beach in Hawaii could have that same kind of heat wave-y orange background, I guess.

But I don't want to derail this any further. OP's analysis merits more discussion than hyper focusing on what Masato Nakamura might or might not have known and thought about the world around 1991-1992. I think what we know of the development shows well enough that the game is a rebuild of itself, and the output has a lot less to do with any supposed original intentions than we'd like.

 

Wouldn't they have had to pay Nakamura to use his music in other projects? Just like with the Sonic theme.

 

This is untrue.

While Metropolis and Genocide City were meant to share graphical assets akin to Emerald Hill and Hill Top (as we know from the Digitizer files), there is no evidence to suggest that MZ3 was a repurposed Act from Genocide City. In fact, it is more likely that MZ3's layout explicitly has nothing to do with GCZ's layouts, as none of its planned three acts resemble any incarnation of MZ3 even remotely.

 

MZ3 also had paper drafts for its third act. People will not let the "GCZ is MTZ3" die. Even in context for when that was supposedly said, it became clearer now that they meant they could implement MTZ act 3 because a level slot was open.

I will also die on the hill that Death Eggs music was meant for GCZ. In the prototypes, Wing Fortress music plays for both Wing Fortress itself and Death Egg. I've almost accepted that Wing Fortress potentially might have BEEN Death Egg act 1. It was only changed when they decided to have the exterior become a...well...plane. The 16x16 tiles in the level even start off with space tiles opposed to anything sky/cloud related.

 

Funny thing is that I've also had a similar effort to make sense of the Sonic 2 soundtrack, and my hack has a clear idea:

• Emerald Hill - consistent
• Chemical Plant - consistent
• Neo Green Hill/Aquatic Ruin - consistent
• Casino Night - consistent
• Hill Top - consistent
• Dust Hill/Mystic Cave - consistent
• Metropolis - consistent
• Sky Chase/Wing Fortress - latter song only
• Winter/Christmas/Rock World/Whatever - Sky Chase
• Genocide/Cyber City - Death Egg
• Oil Ocean - CNZ 2P (akin to betas up to September)
• Sand Shower - Oil Ocean (same scenario as OOZ)
• Wood - EHZ 2P
• Death Egg - Final boss (much like S1's Final Zone)
• Hidden Palace - MCZ 2P (I've come to terms with this song being here instead of Unused Song)

Strangely with someone else saying Wood Zone was gonna use the Mystic Cave 2P song, that doesn't work since that track was used in Hidden Palace from Simon Wai to September 14th, just like with Sand Shower using OOZ and Oil Ocean using CNZ 2P, and CENSOR using the final music order. It forces me to speculate if Emerald Hill 2P was meant for Wood or Blue Ocean like some have speculated. I've had the same research material as others, so I guess there's another voice in the mix lol

 

That’s actually quite an interesting idea. It would greatly explain why wing fortress is absolutely *nowhere* in concept art and the likes. It would also fill the last hole in my personal guess of what the game was originally looking like conceptually.

Pretty sure I made a list exactly like this thread in that old cyber city thread after Frank released the level documents, using info Hez shared at the time, that got little pushback. If I can find it I’ll dig it back up and compare notes.