Sonic 2 Prototypes and Betas have become the stuff of legend and folklore, with numerous tales of lost and stolen versions circulating amongst the community for years alongside of nearly 10 versions which have been discovered to date.
Even now – 27 years after the game’s debut – new and unseen development material is still surfacing, and this time courtascy of a chance meeting at a garage sale!
The story of a meeting between Sonic 2 artist Tom Payne and Jason Moorhouse, owner of the Nostalgia Alley retro video game store on the west coast of the US, saw the exchange of a box chock-full of floppy discs holding unused sprites and development documents (and some other weird stuff!).
Moorhouse, assisted by several others in a philanthropic move have released scans of the documents, as well as the data from the discs which required work reverse engineering the SEGA digitizer format in order to extract.
Extracted from the data were a number of unseen Badniks, including a blue pig, several iterations of designs based on dinosaurs, and some odd artwork reminiscent of the imagery hidden on Sonic CD.
The documents scanned included a “developers pack” of work from Sonic 1, as well as what appears to be Payne’s personal notes from work in Sonic 2 development.
Check out a selection of the scans in the gallary below, and check out the wealth of material from Megabites!
Source: Megabites
Piece of Sonic History!