Sonic the Hedgehog 2/Trivia

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• Christmas Rushed: The game had a lot of content cut from it to meet the deadline, most famously the Hidden Palace Zone. There are also some nasty glitches that occasionally pop up, such as triggering Super Sonic at the end of a level locking the game in place and forcing you to reset it.
• Cut Song: Track 10 in the 16-bit game's sound test is an unused and hauntingly good song that was originally meant for Hidden Palace Zone, and ended up unused when the Zone itself was Dummied Out. Even when Hidden Palace Zone returned in the 2013 remake, the song remained unused (the version uses the 2 Player Mystic Cave Zone theme, which is what it used in leaked prototypes).
• Executive Meddling: Sonic Team planned for eighteen stages but producers wanted to get the game out in time for the Christmas season which forced Sonic Team to scrap several stages.
• Killer App: Next to its precursor, Sonic 2 was the most popular game to own for the Genesis. Like the first game before it, it even became a pack-in game for bundles of the Model 2 Sega Genesis.
• Refitted for Sequel: The ending of Sonic falling through the sky and being caught by Tails was the original ending of the first game.
• Troubled Production:
  • The game's own history can be chronicled by the various Alphas, Betas and Deltas made along the way. Rumor had it that it was supposed to utilize Time Travel, but it proved way too complicated for the simplistic Sega Genesis. Many Zones were planned and removed, including a curiously named stage called Genocide City and the legendary Hidden Palace Zone (which was much later restored as a secret level in the iOS remake). Sega gave Nickelodeon a very early version for Nick Arcade. The game's production, located in Sega Technical Institute's headquarters, was also notorious for language barriers and conflicting work ethics between Japanese Sonic Team members, who Naka brought to the United States to work on the game as he was unhappy with Sega of Japan's policies, and the American STI members, who assisted in the game's development.
  • An HD Fan Remake was cancelled in 2012 when the lead programmer LOst had Creative Differences with the rest of the team and provided a build of the game with DRM protection. Since he had not released the source code for the game's engine, the game could not be updated. Production resumed in 2014 when a fan of the project developed a replacement engine.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • Several planned levels were Dummied Out, such as Wood Zone (eventually recycled as Mushroom Hill in Sonic & Knuckles), Death Egg (all of the level before the final boss fights was cut) and Hidden Palace (whose soundtrack and some data survives in the final cartridge). A lot of Wild Mass Guessing has surrounded these, including the idea that originally Sonic 2 was supposed to have the time-travel gimmick of Sonic CD and the Dust Hill Zone (which eventually became the Mystic Cave Zone) was a Bad Future of Emerald Hill, and so forth. A particularly mysterious cut level is the gloriously named Genocide City Zone.
  • Genocide City was actually supposed to be a single act Zone, and was replaced with Metropolis Zone Act 3, Or So I Heard.
  • Genocide City was eventually renamed Cyber City Zone once the Japanese developers understood what the word actually meant. However, the lost zone did make a comeback of sorts in Sonic Spinball.