ive been super into video game unused content and prototypes for a few years now - theyve always been something ive found really fun to learn about! being able to see what couldve been and envisioning what the scrapped things wouldve been used for is super cool, and recently my favorite unused content related things to learn about have been from the classic era of the sonic franchise, specifically sonic 2! it has the most unused zones and enemies out of all 3 of the classic games. sonic 2 has 6 prototypes in total that have been found so far, and there could be much more out there! fans being able to find old betas of sonic games that somehow still work all these years later is really neat, and they seem to find new ones seemingly out of nowhere, with the latest one being found in 2021.


two weeks before sonic 2 officially released back in ‘92, a group of people were able to find one of the six prototypes and leaked it. i think its a neat little short story :> you can read about it here for more context!

Hidden palace, dust hill, and wood zone are a handful of sonic 2’s scrapped zones but did you know that there were even m o r e zones planned? In total, there are 12 unused/ slightly altered zones, which is quite ambitious- i doubt that huge amount of zones combined with the finished ones wouldve ever been possible on a classic sonic game with the cartridge space and time constraints they had when developing it. Still, its nice to see a little bit of concept art for the zones ideas.

You can read about all the scrapped zones including hidden palace and wood zone here : https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(Genesis)/Scrapped_Zones



My favorite part about prototype related things are definitely the mockup/genuine screenshots that were shown throughout the years. theres a handful of fangames that take the concepts from the screenshots and try to envision what those unused assets and maps from screenshots wouldve looked and played like, which is fun to experience :> i really like the type of beta pictures that have a really bad picture quality, mainly because they give off a unique kind of feeling, almost like a dreamy vibe - its hard to truly know if they were actual screenshots from the 90s or a fake fanmade screenshot, which i think adds to them a lot! It does suck that we will never get to play the original levels from way back when, but at least we have some pictures of them.