The Sonic Adventure 2 that almost was...

I find it highly suspicious, though, that there are rip-off counterparts for Sonic and Knuckles present in the earliest design concepts we know of. Why would the villains conveniently have the identical abilities as the heroes? Furthermore, Metal may not have been playable in Sonic CD, but Knuckles was a playable villain in a more recent game that shares more DNA with the Sonic Team that developed SA2. With their obsession with adding worthless new characters (Big the Cat, much?), I find it hard to believe they wouldn't have jumped at the chance to make Shadow and Rouge playable, especially when their movesets could just be copypasta from S&K.

This is what I assume the thought process to have been:

'Wouldn't it be cool to play a "Dark Side Story", and have a good vs. evil theme like all these modern games that are so edgy?'

'Yeah, you could play as Dr Eggman for the first time ever!'

'But we want a lot of characters like SA1, and we're going to need more villains to correspond to the hero characters everyone will demand be in the game.'

'Let's pull a few out of our ass!'

'Oh, and Tails will correspond with Eggman because he's a mechanic and is used to piloting vehicles.'

'Yay, we're done!'

The secrecy is standard in these things. Remember the hoopla about the Werehog being revealed, even though it was leaked previously?

It was probably always Tails, but I imagine that they didn't want to reveal his new gameplay style right away. They might have had misgivings about changing Tails so much, and didn't want to commit to it by showing it off until they'd run it through more focus testing.

IOW, Just because they didn't show it off doesn't immediately mean it wasn't planned. There wasn't a keening cry for "no friends!" at the time, so they would have been considering ways of shoehorning in Tails as a matter of course.

I really don't see how a good versus evil storyline would work with Sonic, Knuckles, and Eggman. Speculating that Knuckles "changed sides" is just too much.

I just don't want to project a fictitious "original SA2 plan" on the developers that we have no evidence for, just because early trailers don't show everything from the final. Duh, most trailers don't do that, anwyay.

 

And that, kids, is why Big fishes. =P

 

In Sonic Shuffle, Super Sonic had a few mugshots, but there's never been any SA style Super Sonic promo art as far as I know, which actually leads me to believe that it's an edited picture of a prototype version of Shadow, partly because they drew the quills that way and because the pictures feature a pointed nose for some reason.

 

You know... that realllllyyyyy makes sense when you think about it. Also is it me or is "Dark Sonic" from the SA2 beta footage seem to have a different shape in his quills? They sort of seemed at one point like jagged versions of Super/Hyper Sonic's spikes in S3K.

 

Well actually when Sonic R PC hit European shores Sonic Adventure had already been released in Japan... or was just about to be released. It would have had to be something post SA1.

 

All the kids must have sent in evil Sonics with guns and characters with big tits. It explains Shadow and Rouge. :v:

I can remember the Burger King competition, I was going to enter but you had to actually buy a happy meal or whatever to get the form.

 

Cheapskate :P

While your first point may have been facetious, I can actually believe it. Apparently the whole reason that ShtH is as it is comes from the fact that Sonic's core fanbase (that is, ADHD-addled ten-year-olds) kept e-mailing Sega asking for a game where Sonic uses guns. Since they at least had one iota of sense left in them, they weren't gonna give Sonic a Kalashnikov... so they gave one to Shadow instead.

Accordingly, the idea that Burger-King scoffing kids designed lol emo Sonic is by no means a stretch. And probably lol evil Knuckles with jiggle physics too.

Fuckin kids.

 

Hey, just be glad it wasn't left to the furries.

Imagine Knuckles with tits and inflato-Amy and you shouldn't be complaining about emo Sonic =P

 

I'm using the wayback machine on Sonic Team's official site. I'm looking at September 2000 at the screens of SA2. There are screens for Sonic, Knuckles and Eggman so far, with 1 screen of Shadow being released.

These 2 screens caught my eye:





Looks a little different than it does in the final, Shadow's spikes look as if they all point upwards, rather than looking more like Super Sonic.

 

The first shot looks like Shadow is standing on one of the platforms Eggman uses to descend in Iron Gate. The lighting is different in both shots, as well.

 

Shadow's spikes where different in SA2 to his Heroes and ShTH model. The top side spike points outwards aswell as upwards, this detail is missing in later models.

 

This is what I was getting at about Shadow's spikes looking slightly different eariler on. Also, is it me or does the first picture make Shadow look a fair bit more menacing than usual? Either way I like it.

 

I this must be coincidence as Shadow's shadow looks like Metal sonic.

 

O_o

You've seen it; you can't UN-SEE it!

 

He does look a lot more enigmatic in that up-close camera angle and pose.

On that magazine search I mentioned earlier, I got nothing. Don't have anything after 2000. =(

 

That shadow texture is still exactly the same in the final however. Someone mind taking a screen cap of the scene for comparison though?

 

The shadow before was so much more obvious.