The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

I agree, definitely a bootleg; I was just startled by the key art print. The owner replied, said she bought it at a flea market and doesn't know anything beyond that.

 

I was looking up Jungle Zone maps from the SMS and GG version of Sonic 1, and I just noticed something I'd never put together before: Jungle Zone Act 3 is made to resemble a transition into Labyrinth Zone. The stage begins with you running forward and finding a huge pool of water that stretches to the end of the level. You climb up, and after you beat robotnik, the egg prison is on bricks suddenly that resemble those from Labyrinth Zone. Labyrinth Zone Act 1 begins with you high up on some bricks, then heading down a slide that's roughly the same length as the climb up in Jungle zone, which leads to the water at roughly the same level.

 

Man, Into The Wind. I still remember browsing the web back in the day downloading its sample from the old Crush 40 homepage (the orange one) and loving it. Revvin’ Up as well. I'm a little baffled as to why it was chosen the credits theme, though.

 

So I was watching the video that showed Sonic Adventure's first publically-shown footage and noticed something for the first time. Flickies were originally inside Badniks;



Look at the top left of Knuckles' box. A black Flicky.



Two black Flickies and a pink one.

I wonder if Flickies were originally planned to be the animals that you give to Chao. Or whether the system of giving animals collected from Badniks to Chao was devised after the build shown in the footage?

 

The process of feeding defeated enemies to a-life was around before Sonic Adventure, in NiGHTS, so I'd assume those flicky were meant to be fed to chao. In NiGHTS, when you attack an enemy, they become a bouncing ball that you can dash into to ricochet it into a Mapian/Nightopian like a pool cue to give it that enemy properties.

 

One of the early screenshots:

 

I've mentioned this in this thread before (a looong time ago!), but Sonic Jam's Sonic World could provide a clue to this. As we know, Sonic World was built out of the early Saturn version of Sonic Adventure. In it there are five colors of Flickies: blue, red, purple, green and orange.

In Sonic Adventure there are five categories of animals, indicated by their icon borders: blue (normal), red (power), purple (fly), green (run), yellow (swim).

The numbers match, as do the colors themselves (with the exception of orange being changed to yellow).

So the original intention could have been to have just five colors of Flicky and the normal/power/fly/run/swim types. The Chao taking on animal parts, and there being 15 animals (3 for each category) with different stats could have been later developments.

Are there any remnants of the Flicky models and textures on any of the discs we have?

 

I wonder if the black Flickies were an error then, like for some reason a typing wasn't assigned to it and therefore neither was a colour.

 

hmm with regards to Sonic Adventure, things that were untextured tended to show up white, like that inexplicable duck enemy in Final Egg no?



...which implies that the flicky in the Knuckles image was itself untextured, now that I think about it

 

Black Flickies could be a lighting issue. It's a bit strange because the eyes and feet look fine(?) - I'm guessing they use separate textures, but that seems a bit strange for a game of this vintage. But idk.


EDIT: no I take that back
]
there is lighting in play - so yes probably a dodgy texture (or it was meant to be black?)

 

I'm not saying it's a texture issue. The Flicky body probably doesn't have a texture, rather it's vertex coloured. So when it's assigned a type then it has a vertex colour to apply to it, but if not then you can only feed the vertex colour 0, 0, 0 or black. Again, just speculation though.

 

The Women of Sonic the Hedgehog (not the characters)

Love this, I’m sad I just learned of some of this:

 

Madeline Schroeder is in no way "the mother of Sonic". It's a shame the video didn't cover Jina Ishiwatari and Rieko Kodama, the artists who actually worked on the original game.

 

Yeah it's a pretty cool video and idea but it definitely needs a part two for the women who worked on the franchise during the early days to 2000s that made huge contributions to many established elements.

 

I am once again asking people to stop ascribing the creation of Sonic to Sega of America staff

 

On the topic of the SoA staff, it was always confusing to me that SoA was against the idea of Sonic being in a band. Wasn't Rock the cool, hip thing with kids? MTV was big during that time, wasn't it? I always felt that having Sonic in a rock band might've benefited the IP's appeal in the west. Think of all the novelty records they could've sold!



This took longer to make than it probably should've.

 

Technically Jina Ishiwatari is probably the most influential woman in Sonic's history, if not just for drawing Green Hill Zone.

But

They were just following orders. I'm not sure how much creative input they had into the product, other than deciding where individual pixels should go. AFAIK all the big decision makers in the Sonic franchise have been male(?).

Which seems bad... until you realise there hasn't been many decision makers. We've had almost 20 years of Takashi Iizuka at the helm.

 

Frankly it seems like SOA had very little involvement with Sonic 1's development outside of marketing. The Story of Sonic the Hedgehog/Sonic: A Very Quick History documentary or whatever that cites things like Madeline Schroeder's involvement in cutting Madonna is wildly inaccurate, stating things like the Genesis not being able to outperform the NES worldwide in 1988... Overlooking the fact that it was the console's first year in Japan and didn't release in America until 1989 and Europe in 1990. And pushed the idea that Sonic's name was Mr. Needlemouse, or that he had fangs in concept art.
From all the actual info we have, it seems like the only reasons the band was cut was just a desire to go in a different direction or time constraints.
Madeline Schroeder seems to be an extremely unreliable narrator in this whole deal. She's also claimed to have been promoting Sonic 1 by going around in a Sonic mascot costume, but as far as I can tell costumes were only made after Sonic was a hit to promote Sonic 2, which Madeline had already left Sega and founded Crystal Dynamics in July 1992.

 

It's not as if Sega didn't have any women in genuinely significant creative positions that early on either; you had Mie Kumagai on the arcade side for one, and as recently brought up on the wiki, the late Yoko Kobayashi (who was apparently one of Kodama's seniors) designed Alex Kidd, as well as Teddy Boy Blues characters. Sega Magazine (Japan) even had a regular dedicated "Women's Workshop" feature, focusing whole pages on Kumagai and others.

Sonic simply looks more lacking when you realise America's overblown contributions (or lack thereof) weren't really that, and don't imbue much importance in Ishiwatari (who to be fair did put a lot into her work, by all accounts) and Kodama (naturally far more important for her RPGs than Sonic, especially considering she only joined the latter midway through its development). Which just makes you want to consider why, besides the likes of Iizuka being immovable?

 

It does feel like the same core group of people have been working on Sonic since at least 2005/2006. As if the openings haven't really been there for fresh blood, female or otherwise.

There might have been a Sonic walking around Winter CES 1992, which would have been in January.

So much of the pre-internet gaming scene is currently lost to time - I can absolutely imagine Sonic turning up at "events" to promote the first game, or Sega more generally. It's just a black hole of knowledge.

Sega of America's roles are probably overstated, but I don't think it necessarily comes from malice. I think it's more, "they gave feedback to Japan, saw a change, and assumed it was their words that caused it". The more likely reality was Sega of Japan had similar ideas all along.


Madonna being a stupid idea is an opinion likely shared by people of all backgrounds.