The development of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 continues to be one of the most well documented stories in gaming history. The Video Game History Foundation have now preserved artwork from 2 ex-SEGA Technical Institute artists and discover a whole host of content from the game’s early development that we’ve never seen before. See below for a full list of the discoveries that they’ve made:
– Dark Empire was a cancelled STI Mega Drive game that was shelved due to Sonic 2 getting green-lit
– Maps of the concept stage Genocide/Cyber City by Tom Payne have been scanned that give us a better understanding of what this stage might have looked like
– A working demo of Genocide/Cyber City has been produced with Hez of Sonic the Hedgehog Classic fame, who has also been working on his own preservation of Wood/Secret Jungle Zone
– All of Tom Payne’s artwork has been made available to browse on Archive.org by clicking here
– The Sand Shower mock-up screen is actually animated and viewable on Brenda Cook’s VHS portfolio alongside a Wood/Secret Jungle Zone mock-up
– Brenda Cook’s VHS portfolio also reveals a completely unseen Winter-themed zone which is a palette swap of Sand Shower that now features snow and Christmas trees
– Brenda Cook’s VHS portfolio has been entirely preserved on YouTube and is available to watch by clicking here. It also contains artwork for a deleted Sonic Spinball stage
You can watch the entire video on all of these discoveries from The Video Game History Foundation via the embed below:
Craig Stitt’s SEGAPede game has been discussed previously as some footage of it had been released back in August 2020 where it was known as Astropede. The game was pitched as a spin-off to the Sonic series where you play as a badnik who befriends Sonic. Using existing Hidden Palace tile-sets from his work on Sonic 2, Stitt developed a prototype to pitch to SEGA but the game was never picked up.
Now thanks to the amazing work of Hidden Palace, this prototype has been dumped and archived so we can actually experience the SEGAPede prototype in all its glory. You can check out direct capture of the game via the embed below:
You can download the SEGAPede prototype from the game’s entry on the Hidden Palace wiki. The ROM will run under emulation or on real hardware. Thanks again to the Hidden Palace team for their incredibly digital archive work and making sure this piece of SEGA history is now available to all.
The first images of an unreleased Mega Drive Sonic spin-off called Treasure Tails have appeared online. These come directly from Craig Stitt who many may know as an artist on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic Spinball. Stitt himself pitched the game back in February 1993. The game was meant to be a forced-perspective platform/puzzle/adventure game featuring Tails as the main playable character. It supposedly never made it to a playable state and the images seen in this article come from a VHS tape that Stitt have put together in 1995.
In addition to this discovery, the first concept images of Boomer the Turtle have also appeared. This was a character Stitt designed for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as Sonic’s original sidekick before Tails was even conceived. The character was ultimately scrapped.
Also released is footage of another unreleased title that Craig Stitt pitched called Astropede. The game features a centipede protagonist that runs at high speeds through a stage that uses graphics from the then-unreleased Hidden Palace stage from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Stitt had hopes that the character could exist as a part of Sonic’s Universe. Check out the footage from SEGAbits below:
A collection of floppy disks previously owned by SEGA Technical Institute employee Tom Payne has ended up in the hands of Jason Moorhouse, a California-based retro game shop owner. With the help of Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, Bob Morgan and Jessie Perez, these disks have been dumped and converted into a readable format and some incredible discoveries have been made.
The most interesting of the bunch is an unreleased Mega Drive game called Spinny & Spike vs the Nightmare King. The game is not in a playable state, but various art assets have been ripped and a selection of them are viewable here:
Also included are a huge selection of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 development documents. A lot of these documents are previously released concepts by Yasushi Yamaguchi, but there are some new discoveries in here and we’ve included a selection below.
If you want to read the full story on the origins of the box of floppies and exactly what is contained on each disk then click here to go to the Megabits blog and have a look around. There is some truly fascinating stuff here.
SEGADriven and its original content are copyrighted to their respective authors. Media related directly to SEGA is copyrighted to its respective authors. Any comments on SEGA-related materials do not represent SEGA themselves. All rights reserved 2008-2022.
