Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is considered the quintessential Sonic game, the one that really allowed the series to take off. However, a number of things were tried and abandoned during its development, mostly disappearing from the game with only a few traces, like the prototype title screen in the manual or song #10 in Sound Test. In most cases, the earlier versions of games are lost in time, though occasionally some come to the surface… And Sonic 2 is one of these games.
Sometime in the late 90s, a ROM of an earlier prototype, dubbed by fans as Sonic 2 Beta or the Sonic 2 Simon Wai Prototype after the guy who found it, began floating around the net. Playing the game normally only allowed four of the game’s zones to playable, though these stages were still incomplete in their own ways, such as the bottom half of Aquatic Ruin (called “Neo Green Hill” here) missing and an unused snail robot showing up in Emerald Hill (Green Hill.) Other things were different, like Sonic’s sprites were a different, Tails’ AI was pretty much now existent, and Tails getting hurt causing the player to loss ALL rings.
This was just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Accessing stage select showed that the planned stage layout was much different than the final. Many stages, like the above-mentioned Aquatic Ruins and Emerald Hill, were under different names. A few stages were barely even started and selecting them was pretty pointless as you just fell to your death. Gimmicks in some stages didn’t work the way they do in the final game, usually rendering the stages unplayable. Casino Night had a different color pallet and was a jumbled mess, which, again, rendered it unplayable.
The biggest thing about the prototype was the inclusion of two stages that weren’t in the final game but had some work done: Wood Zone and Hidden Palace Zone. The Wood Zone takes place in a forest, though only a small section was actually completed. The music for the stage is an earlier version of the Metropolis Zone (which is also present in the prototype,) and the inclusion of an off-screen conveyor belt lead some to believe that time travel may have been planned.
The Hidden Palace Zone, however, is perhaps the biggest curiosity. This cave stage is home to respawning bat and dinosaur enemies, as well a tube blocked by a giant emerald similar to Sonic & Knuckles’ Master Emerald. This spawned a theory that the purpose of this stage was meant to be where Sonic would officially have become Super Sonic for the first time. Unfortunately, future prototypes that have surfaced since indicate that no additional work was done to this stage.
Sonic 2 Beta has created something of a legacy for Sonic fanatics. The Wood Zone was revealed to be the home of Knothole Village in an issue of Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comic series. Hidden Palace itself can be accessed in the iOS version of Sonic 2 by a certain infamous spike pit in the Mystic Cave, though the layout is different from the prototype.
As you can see from the video, I have only scratched the surface of the difference between the prototype and the final versions of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Or should I say “prototypes?” Since the discovery of the Simon Wai Prototype,many other prototypes have been discovered starting with the Nick Arcade Prototype in 2006. Every version of the game has been dissected for other things that may have been unused, with a degree of success. I imagine by now there really isn’t much as new that can be discovered this gaming classic, though a new prototype could ultimately reveal more insights of what could have been.
Related Links
Sonic Retro
Sonic News Network
Secrets of Sonic Team (No Longer Updated)
The Cutting Room Floor
Unseen 64
