Sonic the Hedgehog 2/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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.
  • Urban Legend of Zelda: Several planned levels were Dummied Out, such as Wood Zone (eventually recycled as Mushroom Hill in Sonic and 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 by the third act of Metropolis Zone, 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.
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