Hirokazu Yasuhara revealing never before seen Sonic 1&2 development info

[TheOcelot]

Okay, this is worthy of a topic. 

Hirokazu Yasuhara has been speaking at game industry conference, Digital Dragons (in Poland) and revealing development stuff about Sonic 1&2. @necrosofty has been posting stuff from the conference on Twitter.

Never before seen unused overworld maps from Sonic 2. Which shows unused zone names, some never heard of:

Blue Lake Zone
Ocean Wind Zone
Olympus 
Rock World Zone

Sand Shower Zone
Tropical Plant Zone

 

Sonic 2 was original going to have time travel and Hirokazu wasn't aware Naoto Ohshima was also implementing time travel for Sonic CD (both games were being developed at the same time)!

 

Sonic 1 design sketches:

"Trying to get @yasuharah more active on twitter: please RT if you'd like to see more of his design sketches, like these from before Sonic 1".

 

Original Green Hill level map:

A video of the presentation may end up being uploaded here:

 

So yeah, some really fascinating stuff! 

 

[Jango]

Oh. My God. That's incredible! This game's two decades and a half old, and we still get new stuff out of it. Love the zones' names, and the time travel concept with different time periods! O.o

And there we have our old friend Genocide City, which actually existed at some point, wow!

[Osmium]

This is really interesting. I'm guessing the chronological order of those maps is the third one first, then the first one, then the fourth one, and lastly the second one as the (bad) future. 

[Betz]

3 hours ago, OcelotBot said:

Okay, this is worthy of a topic. 

Hirokazu Yasuhara has been speaking at game industry conference, Digital Dragons (in Poland) and revealing development stuff about Sonic 1&2. @necrosofty has been posting stuff from the conference on Twitter.

Never before seen unused overworld maps from Sonic 2. Which shows unused zone names, some never heard of:

Blue Lake Zone
Ocean Wind Zone
Olympus 
Rock World Zone

Sand Shower Zone
Tropical Plant Zone

 

Sonic 2 was original going to have time travel and Hirokazu wasn't aware Naoto Ohshima was also implementing time travel for Sonic CD (both games were being developed at the same time)!

 

Sonic 1 design sketches:

"Trying to get @yasuharah more active on twitter: please RT if you'd like to see more of his design sketches, like these from before Sonic 1".

 

Original Green Hill level map:

A video of the presentation may end up being uploaded here:

 

So yeah, some really fascinating stuff! 

 

I'm not gonna lie, this sounds way more epic than what Sonic 2 turned out to be in the end. Just my opinion. But I think with the right people, this could be turned into an awesome fangame/hack.

[The drunkard from space!]

It would be absolutely amazing for someone or even for SEGA to re-implement all of there scrapped ideas into Sonic 2. Heck maybe Team Mania could do it when they're finished with Sonic Mania. (perhaps Mania is doing this hence the return of older zones)

[expansivelovestories]

The time periods are rather similar to Chrono Trigger!!  This would most likely have been released first.  Overall I think i prefer Sonic 2 being what is ended up being, and Square not having felt any hesitation that Chrono Trigger would have been copying an earlier game. 

It does feel like some of the artistic depth of this planned immersive world did reach Sonic 3 and Knuckles! 

If there is a current fangame team that could make this game, it could certainly be LakeFeperd's team?  Although, Lake himself, having completed the surprising and incredible trio of 2D Sonic fangames, then created Spark the Electric Jester, and now is also working on a 3D Sonic engine in Unity. 

[Multikaris]

So, "Rock Zone" was named Rock WORLD Zone, eh? And we really WERE going back to Green Hill and it wasn't just a leftover from development? Neat! Now if we could see Speedy the Porcupine and Boomer the Turtle's concept artwork...

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

These are absolutely awesome to look at, I just love the linework, style, and level of detail and personality. Honestly though, we don't really need two time-travel Sonic games, so I'm glad they sorted that out and didn't implement it...lol! But I am fascinated that they seem to have a "Medieval Time" and an "Ancient Time", implying two "layers" of past, unless I'm misreading.

I would love to know where they were going with some of these things, it's totally fascinating, but I don't necessarily want to see someone try to alter or remake Sonic 2 to incorporate these concepts, especially assuming that they didn't get very far in developing some of them. They might be fun to reference in a fangame, hack or official game, but Sonic 2 is fine as is without throwing in a bunch of levels that would essentially be all-new. You might as well make a new game at that point. Hmm, the situation would kind of be like Mania I suppose, with a combination of old and new levels, but not exactly - at least Mania is supposed to be a celebration of the entire classic series in general, not trying to unnecessarily make a new version of one existing game to reincorporate a bunch of ideas and levels that probably didn't need to be there to begin with.

[Salamander]

It's absolutely fascinating, but I think I can see why it didn't stick, in that it's both too complex and somewhat redundant.  You've got two presents, it looks like you have two pasts, you whizz around them in a predetermined order - it looks like it would become difficult to keep track of which area is supposed to be where.  Then you take into account the way the different time periods don't seem to have much to do with each other; the time periods in Sonic CD take you to the same zone in different times, but in this version of events then each zone would be a completely different zone depending on the time period.  How are you supposed to make the connection between Hill Top, Green Hill, Dust Hill, and Chemical Plant?  It's too easy to conceive of them as independent places, which of course is what they eventually became.  (Granted, they could have had more similarities if this plan had been carried forward.)

[CleverSonicUsername]

 

Edit: Nevermind, an image didn't load originally, the one with the lines laid out showing how time would progress, so I'm probably dead wrong.

[Your Vest Friend]

9 hours ago, Miru the Living Planet said:

Now if we could see Speedy the Porcupine and Boomer the Turtle's concept artwork...

That would be a lot harder to get at, and it certainly wouldn't be Yasuhara to approach for that. At best, you might be able to get something out of Yamaguchi regarding that, but bear in mind that they were part of a company contest (ala the design the main character thing Sonic 1 did) so he didn't even do those himself, and SEGA haven't been as public with showing Sonic 2 concepts off like that as they have been with Sonic 1. 

Plus Yamaguchi has to be the least readily accessible of the classic character designers, I don't think he has any online presence and hasn't done interviews often at all.

[TheOcelot]

Hirokazu has been posting more Sonic 1 concept sketches:

 

 

EDIT: Apparently this ^^^ isn't the presentation he did in Poland.

 

Regarding the presentation he did in Poland:

 

This is pretty much the entire classic fanbase right now:

 

[Jango]

Someone pass this on to Iizuka and Sonic Team, ask them to study it before thinking about making a 2D game.

[Guest]

The talk linked earlier didn't have the Sonic dev stuff. However, the English one he did that does include Sonic dev stuff was just put up:

 

[Your Vest Friend]

On 2017-6-4 at 2:55 PM, Jango said:

Someone pass this on to Iizuka and Sonic Team, ask them to study it before thinking about making a 2D game.

To be fair, I don't think Sonic Team ever will make a 2D game again. The Generations/Forces classic segments are about as close as you'll get, and in those games they're not fussed with adhering to the actual classic mechanics so much. 

[TheOcelot]

Also this:

"Level Environment would be also changed its behavior by the difference of character-form."

[HywelAtTheMoon]

Stuff they used in Sonic 3's Icecap Zone. Only you merely had to get near them to trigger the drop. 

[Shiny Gems]

Has anyone posted this lovely concept art from Sonic Retro yet?

[TheOcelot]

 

Two more sketches:

"I see that I'd been looking for the reason why player has to let the hero perform rolling"...

 

"This idea didn't adopt for the game. Because Sonic runs too fast to see this sort of gimmicks".

 

 

 

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

Imagine how cool it would be if some of these unused gimmicks made it into Mania or future classic-styled games.

[TheOcelot]

"This was an idea for water-level. Character has to prepare floating platform in a certain time".

[Your Vest Friend]

I can see why that one was scrapped. 

[Osmium]

27 minutes ago, VEDJ-F said:

I can see why that one was scrapped. 

It's pretty much the corks from Labyrinth zone except for the pushing part. 

[TheOcelot]

This is also a gimmick which related with water.