The Video Game History Foundation unveils never-before-seen cut levels from Sonic the Hedgehog 2

We’re a little late reporting on this, but we just could not let it go. Not when it concerns one of the most important Sonic games of all time. Celebrated video game preservationist Frank Cifaldi, of the Video Game History Foundation, has come into contact with some American artists formally employed at Sega Technical Institute, where Sonic 2 was developed, and with their help, has unearthed some never before seen artwork and information about cut content from Sonic 2. He’s even learned about a whole different Genesis/Mega-Drive game the studio was working on that got canned in order to bring all hands on deck for Sonic 2.

You can see the video right up above and check in past the break for a summery of what was shown off in the video.

While I’m not sure if this was already known, Sonic 2 was originally planned to center around time travel. Much like Sonic CD, which was being developed at Sega of Japan around the same time as Sonic 2, Sonic and Tails were meant to travel to the past and the future, with the future being the same environments transformed into an over-polluted, industrial nightmare by Dr. Eggman. However, there wasn’t enough time to realize this vision, so the developers just put together the most promising level ideas they came up with, regardless of if they fit together or not, and made a complete package out of it. Really gives some interesting insight for what was originally intended for levels like Chemical Plant, Casino Night, and Oil Ocean Zone, and even a few cut levels.

Tom Payne’s contributions to this video included near-complete map layouts of the cut Genocide/Cyber City Zone. They were put together and scanned in immaculate quality for all to see, and then playable mockups of the stages were made by Hez, a developer of Sonic the Hedgehog Classic. He’s already been working on recreations of cut levels we were already aware of, like Wood Zone, seen in the video below. Frank has uploaded Tom Payne’s artwork to Archive.org, so you can check it out at your own pace. It might even serve as good level design inspiration, especially if you’re working on a Sonic fan game of your own.

Sand Shower Zone, a cut level that’s already known by this point, actually had a still image with animated elements. This level was envisioned by Brenda Cook, formally Brenda Ross, who had an animated mock-up of this level on her own VHS artwork portfolio. That same video cassette also had animated art of a new winter themed level we’d never seen before, which is essentially a palette swap of Sand Shower Zone, with some objects being replaced entirely, like Christmas trees in place of cacti. The video even included a cut level she designed for Sonic Spinball. Frank has uploaded the entire portfolio video to YouTube, for you to see in its entirety.

This is quite the exciting discovery that Frank Cifaldi has made, and we at Segabits extend our thanks to him and the Video Game History Foundation for their amazing work at preserving history that could’ve easily been lost forever without them. You, too, can show them some gratitude with a donation to the VGHF to help them preserve even more lost video game content from long ago, in case you feel like it. After all, these aren’t just some armchair historians on YouTube looking up stuff on Wikipedia and Sonic Retro and presenting it to you like it’s the discovery of the century. These are actual professionals really going out of their way to contact old developers and preserve their findings to also be detailed on Wikipedia, Sonic Retro, and so on. That kind of work deserves so much praise in this day and age.

Before we go, we would also like to point you out to their video detailing their all new online VGHF Library, an online library of all the gaming archive materials they’ve gathered up to now that you’ll be able to peruse online to your heart’s content. It will begin opening up next year. Get hyped, Sega fans. Heck, all retro gamers oughta get hyped, never mind Sega gamers.