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Posts Tagged ‘tom payne’

Lost Zones from Sonic 2 Discovered in Ex-STI Artist Portfolios

Wednesday, December 13th, 2023

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:

Box of STI Floppy Disks Contain Unreleased Mega Drive Game, Sonic 2 Development Documents and Other Rarities

Saturday, April 20th, 2019

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.

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