Holiday Treat #11: Sonic 2's Lost Levels

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Normally, as a patron you'd be getting our Tuesday content 24 hours early, but today's a little bit different!

We've been working hard on a mini documentary about some of the lost stages from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and some of the new cutting room floor material we've managed to preserve in 2023. Sonic 2 is a game that was practically trimmed in half from its original conception, so there's actually a fascinating wealth of material that didn't make it into the final game. I explain a lot of how this came about in the video, so I hope you'll tune in.

I want everyone to be surprised at the same time, as we've uncovered something cool that has never been seen before! So instead of our normal method of keeping the video unlisted and showing it to you 24 hours early, we decided to do a YouTube Premiere for everyone, tomorrow at 10am Pacific. This way, not only do we avoid anyone spoiling things early, we also get to capture the video's live chat for posterity. I've also made this Patreon post public for everyone instead of our normal locked early access, on the off-chance someone sees the title and joins just to see the video early.

Here's a small sneak peek, which might look familiar if you happened to watch us on this year's Preserved Play stream. This is a partial reconstruction of a cut stage called "Cyber City," using surviving documents from zone artist Tom Payne. We overlaid some new sprite art by Sonic homebrew author Hez, which was constructed based on tiny scraps of genuine Cyber City art that survived, as well as some of Tom's later art for Sonic Spinball that seems to have used Cyber City as its basis.

I really can't get enough of Yasuhara's adorable interpretation of Sonic.

I really like this approach to reconstructing levels based on partial data. We just don't have everything we would need to present something true to what the original vision would have been, we just have a handful of real pieces and some partial clues about others, so Hez and I struck a balance between educated guesswork and sticking to the facts in front of us. I imagine fleshed out fan interpretations will come later, but I wanted the first historical record to be a little bit more objective, as unofficial reconstructions have a nasty habit of being later interpreted as the genuine article.

There's more in the video, and I promise even if you've been following the bits and pieces of this we've been teasing, there's going to be at least one surprise for you. And if you're the type who likes rolling your sleeves up and digging into source material, we've got a whole bunch of it. See you tomorrow!