For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Genocide City was a scrapped zone from Sonic 2, found within the prototype dubbed "Sonic 2 Beta". The problem was, there was nothing there. the zone was either scrapped, or more than likely never worked on. Just a bunch of jumbled ARZ tiles loaded, and some CPZ music playing. Then you'd fall to your death the instant the zone loaded.
For over 5 years, we could only theorize and speculate as to how this enigmatic zone would look, until now. ICE Knight, an awesome researcher over at SWS2B.com who has unearthed mmany a concept art and conducted various interviews, has finally exposed the only known concept art of the Zone known as Genocide City. Or perhaps I should say Cyber City, as the art shows us that that was its name at its conception.
My source is SWS2b.com. Check it out if you are interested. It should be right smack on the front page, the first item of news there. While you are it it, you may want to pay the actual guy who found its' site a visit.
For a guy like me, this is very exciting news. I've followed the Sonic research scene almost ever since its inception 6 years ago. We've come quite far in those years.
Well, there's one more Sonic 2 mystery under wraps. Huzzah!
I saw it and it has quite a few resemblances to metallic madness zone in Sonic CD. That laser thing kind of looks like those lasers you go through to turn yourself back to full size after shrinking. I guess it was a harmful laser that needed to be turned off by some kind of switch to progress. It's very interesting because it appears to have diagnol conveyer belts that were left out the final game and places to fall through the floor through those trap door looking things.
A lot of people compare it to The Machine from Spinball, actually; like Genocide City Zone was turned into it, only because it couldn't make it into Sonic 2. Kinda like how Toxic Caves has Hidden Palace Zone rocks in the background.
Apparently, the guy who was assigned to design genocide city got the inspiration from genocide city to create an area in an unreleased game for mega drive called B bomb. I suppose as graphics were apparently reused from B bomb for the machine in spinball, we could possibly get a little idea on how genocide city POSSIBLY could have looked like, but only bits of it.
A lot of stuff in this picture looks scarily similar to Scrap Brain zone when compared to a screenshot. Tiles, BG...maybe thats why it was scrapped. Time contraints combined with the fact that it was too similar to metroplois and Scrap Brain.
At any rate, its deifnitley possible some art and ideas were in spinball, as its been confirmed that other lost zones' art, such as Hidden Palace, was reused in some shape or from in Spinball's levels.
Another thing to note, as mentioned earlier, is that the laser beam looks _exaclty_ like the beams in Metallic Madness, and the fact that the zone shares Sonic CD's "two letter name" rule (Paltree Panic, Collsion Chaos, Cyber City). Perhpas a zone that was planned for the alleged Sonic 2 for Sega CD? Or perhpas it was to be what is now known as the "R3 level", althgough that area looked a bit ruin-ish in the full ending.
Either way, this answers many questions, raises many more, and is some truly exciting material.
