So I Found Some Of SA2's "Lost" Real World Locations...

[Badnik Mechanic]

A few months ago, I started working on a 'simple' video retrospective of Sonic Adventure 2.

This is the result from all that work, if you want the video version of this thread, skip to 19:30 and do that, because I put a lot of effort into my visuals lol.

Anyway...

As I do with my retrospectives, I like to take a look at the development of the game, and as we all know Sonic Team were based in San Francisco and took influence from their surroundings... But what I was a bit surprised at was the lack of documentation from Sonic Team regarding this.

With SA1, they released their own mini documentary and loads of photographs, you've probably seen the footage from the SA1 announcement conference.
 

Well, with SA2, they only released 2 official photos from the development tour they did. Don't adjust your settings, this is the max resolution for the first pic.

And that's it, not really a lot we can get from these. However, I was able to find the real world locations of these two pics.

The first is around 1254 Montgomary Street, this was quite easy to find, due to the tall 'tower' building in the background, it didn't require much detective work... the 2nd pic however... 

Is just around the corner at 311 Union Street.

So this location is actually in the North Eastern part of the city, close to where the San Francisco Sega HQ used to be, so I figured, outside of the more common landmarks used, like Yosemite National Park, Alcatraz Island, The Naval Yard. If Sonic Team were going to pose for Photos on Union Street, it's very likely that their research would have been around this area of the city. 

It's not likely that they'd travel all over the place or deviate too much for their 'city' research. 

So I wondered if the game itself had any clues to Sonic Teams route on their fact finding trip, or if there were any indicators of where they visited. Since the first and 2nd game used photographs as textures, could we look at actual in game assets to find real world locations?

It turns out we can.

City Escape has these parking signs all over it. 

But here's where it gets spicy, San Francisco only has a tiny area where it allows for that combination of Parking, take a look at the parking permit map, but now with all the locations mentioned so far.

We've now narrowed down the fact finding trip, to just a few city blocks.

In fact, we're narrowed it down to a single street... Corner.

Over the precise layout of the signs has altered, but if you look at older street view images, you can find one that almost looks precisely like the one used in the game, just the signs are flipped.

This location is 1565 Broadway, whilst I couldn't research literally every single possible street. There was only 1 other street where this combination of parking permits and street cleaning was possible...  

This is a more likely candidate, however I was unable to find a sign that showed the street cleaning on this particular road. Why do I think this one is more likely? Well this is 'Green Street' and it's on a hill... Yes the Green Hill Zone.

So lets skip ahead a bit and now plot our map with a bunch more information...

So there's a bunch of lines here what's going on? 

The Two dark red lines that run from top to bottom of Zone A. That's the cable car lines, specifically, for the 1 cable car design you see in the game.

The Red line running left to right is Union Street.
The Green line is Green Street.
Purple Line is Broadway.
The Blue line that runs on the perimeter of Zone A and K: That's actually a major highway called Route 101, which was used as one of the karting stages in the game.

The Blue Circle, where the parking signs were found, and must be the approximate area as to where Sonic Team visited. where Sonic Team must have visited.

 

Now I wasn't just done with this, whilst I had one specific location, it stood to reason that with the naval yard being in the north east, Sega being in the North East, there would also be other spots from the North East also used, and it turned out there was.

Since this topic is long enough already, if you want to see more, please give the top video a look. But I was able to find a strong candidate for some of the runnels used in City Escape and Mission Street, specifically, the Stockton Street tunnel. Even some of the light fittings used in City Escape park area, there's a few of those still in use around some of the small city parks.

Anyway, hope you found some entertainment from this.

[SticksSuperFan14]

I like Sonic best when it takes influence from western places/media, this feels missing in recent titles tbh and I wish it would return in future titles.