This image, showing how originally the game had more swearing (taken from an old Censored Gaming video) has been posted numerous times across Sonic websites over the last 20 years, and I was curious as to where the hell it came from. Going by the watermark, it comes from an old article on Sonic CIS, a popular Russian Sonic community. Apparently, in September 2005, Sony held their annual Playstation Experience event in Moscow, and a preview build of the PS2 version of Shadow was available to the public. This may or may not predate the Beta 4 build that was found a while back. Website staff went and filmed their own footage, and it consisted of a 46-minute playthrough of the entirety of the neutral path. According to the comments, this video had no sound (though Varyen, the person who filmed it, tells me otherwise). The image comes from that video. Planete-Sonic, a popular French Sonic community, also wrote their own article with full coverage of the event. Screenshots are all that remain of this playthrough, such as this one showing the infamous cut part of the opening where Maria gets shot. If the video was found, this would be the highest quality footage of this shot. Beyond the opening cutscene, we can see that some of the in-game dialogue was different as well. The important thing here is that a full playthrough of a Shadow 05 prototype was recorded, and is now lost. Video streaming sites weren't really a thing yet, so the video was instead shared through FTP and torrents, and 20 years later, those are obviously long gone. They may have even been gone by 2006. Once the game was released, this video was pretty much ignored and forgotten. The community was starting to become fascinated by the Sonic 2 Simon Wai build, but prototypes of newer Sonic games weren't taken seriously yet. I tried emailing both Planete-Sonic and Sonic CIS staff (obviously not in English), but have yet to receive a reply over a week later. So I'm desperately asking if any veterans here have been hanging on to a 20-year-old video.
(warning before you read the rest: nothing new but I've been on this train before) As a kid, I swear I saw a YouTube video showing a clip of the Maria cut spliced to the regular FMV as a reconstruction of the original scene. This had to have been around 2010, and I like a normal 6 year old was desperately digging through like random pages trying to find more about it. I think this was around the same time the Japanese Shadow website was still online and you could still watch the streamable videos (no, that website didn't have the Maria scene, but it had some weird music videos), but I remember as a kid feeling pretty stumped that I couldn't find any more about this one scene. ...Or the Sins of a Divine Mother information. That one I was more invested in, but yeah a lot of the old Shadow stuff has fallen through the throes of link rot. It'd be amazing if someone still has the original video files to those two recordings in particular.
I think I know what video you're talking about, I had a look on YT by searching before:2011 but couldn't find it anymore. Found this one from 2020 though I also found these, which I don't think I'd ever seen before at 1:14 you can see the original Maria death scene in Shadow's eyes idk if that was in the final release.
Here's an archive of the torrent front page with "Shadow The Hedgehog Walktrough (Moscow PSEx)" at the bottom. I wasn't able to find more than this, sadly. Not even the file name. It wasn't clear in the original sonic-world.ru link, but here's all the screenshots: https://sonic-world.ru/files/downloads/news/050924/ShTH Screenshots/ Also here's a transcription: https://www.theghz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=46174#p46174
They do, an archive of them is linked in the article I posted. That's where I got the Maria image. However, it doesn't seem to be of any value. Nothing about them apart from the three images in the OP seems different from the final at a glance. Without the full video, we won't know for sure what else is different. The reason I didn't link the archive in the OP is because you can't link to them directly. You can only view them by getting there from the article, otherwise you get a 404 page. UPDATE 6/2/2025: Asked Varyen, the person who filmed the playthrough, on Telegram about it. Coincidentally, he and other past and present Sonic-World staff discussed this video a month ago, but no one still has it.
