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Information about the development of the classic-era Sonic games isn't exactly hard to come by - The Cutting Room Floor and Sonic Retro in particular have comprehensive articles that go into great detail about them, after all. In my experience though the games that get talked about the most and thus have had their stories spread the widest are the three core Genesis/Mega Drive titles (& Knuckles). It's safe to assume most folks have probably already heard about scrapped zones like Genocide City and Wood Zone, and Hidden Palace was lucky enough to get the remake treatment in the 2013 version of Sonic 2. But what about Sonic CD?
This article aims to give a general description of the best-known scrapped Round from Sonic CD and the namesake of this site. A lot of the information here can be found in greater detail on both the Sonic Retro page on R2 as well as The Cutting Room Floor article on CD, and I recommend checking those out for the full picture! I would not have been able to write about R2 without them.
The existence of a scrapped stage in Sonic CD was more or less proven not long after the game's release thanks to level select codes. These revealed the internal order of the stages of the game and showcased a noticeable skip from R1, Palmtree Panic, to R3, Collision Chaos. For a long time this was, of course, not much more than educated speculation that stemmed from this oddity, but the existence of R2 was eventually proven around the release of the 2011 CD remake as a part of a developer's diary video that showcases a bunch of artwork from the development of Sonic CD. While the video doesn't outright confirm R2 or refer to it very directly, it notably shows artwork of rainbow waterfalls that don't resemble any stage from the final version CD. This was however later confirmed to have been a sketch made for R2 by Christian Whitehead on a Sonic Retro forum thread. In 2013 Whitehead additionally released some unused sprites that would have been used in R2, which have been archived and can be seen on The Cutting Room Floor.
In the final game, the slots where R2 would have resided instead contain the time travel warp screen, the game's opening, and an unused "Comin' Soon" screen. Not quite as glamorous as something like the remnants of a prototype stage would have been, but it's something!
While R2, stemming from Round 2, is the "safest" name for the stage as the game internally refers to all stages as R#, R2 did naturally have a name that was used for it during development. The Cutting Room Floor refers to it as Dubious Depths, which was a name confirmed by CD's developers, though "Ridicule Root" seems to have been another early name for the stage.
Speculation about the design of the stage paints a different image of R2, but I personally find the implications of these prototype names fascinating. Dubious Depths suggests some kind of water-related aesthetic to me, which fits well with the aforementioned concept art of waterfalls, but Ridicule Root on the other hand sounds like a name better suited for a forested area. Just from the names alone R2, at least in my mind, shapes into a kind of underground cavern with water features, which to me seems reasonably possible considering how the rest of the stages in the game have similarly descriptive names.
Besides the rainbow waterfalls and scrapped enemies, there's very little visuals we actually have for R2. Sonic Retro's page does a great job compiling most if not all visual information we have of R2, including a piece of concept art released with Sonic Origins showing an illustration of Little Planet with a section dedicated to R2. Said illustration does show a considerable underground section as part of R2, aligning with my image of the stage as a kind of underground haven of sorts.
It's additionally been suggested that R2 would've had visual similarities to Marble Zone from Sonic 1, as the rest of Sonic CD's stages are similar tributes or recreations of the zones from the game. The visuals we have can also be compared to Aquatic Ruin Zone from Sonic 2, and admittedly the waterfall sketch in particular fits the zone at least thematically, even if the aesthetic seems much different at least in my humble opinion.
We also have piece of animation from the full ending sequence that shows Sonic in an environment that doesn't match any known stage from the game. Some have suggested this unknown place is R2, as it appears between scenes showing Palmtree Panic and Collision Chaos and features an unused enemy confirmed to have been planned for R2 originally. Whether this is the case is somewhat unclear, however, as while Christian Whitehead suggested this could be the case, CD's director Naoto Oshima stated that this sequence does not take place in R2 as revealed in this Sonic Retro forum post. The post further speculates this scene might have been a generic "placeholder" location of sorts while the developers weren't certain which stages would be present in the final game, which wouldn't be a surprising turn of events at all. The animators would have needed to start their work early in the development to finish it in time, and having to make drastic changes late in the pipeline would've been rather unreasonable if not impossible especially in the era of cell animation.
Cut and unused content in video games obviously fascinates many of us, me included. As a result The Cutting Room Floor is one of my favorite websites, not just from the perspective of video game history and archival, but also as a look into how some of our favorite video games were born, effectively. There is a special quality to seeing how the games we love came to be, learning about the decisions the developers made along the way - and finding pieces that never made it in to the final product.
It likely was for the better that R2, or Dubious Depths, ended up scrapped, after all some reasons for its removal tell tales of a stage that didn't compliment Sonic's speed, and might have been unpleasant to traverse had it been anything like Marble Zone. I wouldn't claim to mourn the loss of the stage, either, as cool as the rainbow waterfalls may have sounded. But I do find a kind of beauty in this what-if scenario, the thought exercise of speculating what this stage could have been like had it ever been fully realized. It further adds to the mysterious nature of Sonic CD, a Sonic game that wasn't quite a sequel to the first game, released on an add-on only so many people actually purchased for themselves; a game that presents its story through animations compressed into sequences of pixel art and music that doesn't loop seamlessly. Dubious Depths feels right at home in the wider sphere of the experience of Sonic CD in its incomplete, splintered, and ghostly state, in ways that Sonic 2's scrapped zones simply do not achieve. Hidden Palace was eventually finished in some fashion and give to us to experience, and Wood Zone's data remains for us to marvel, but Dubious Depths stays out of our reach, existing only as fragments of something that could have been that we must complete with our own imaginations - and for that alone I adore it.
Much like I mentioned before, the actual information on this page is largely from Sonic Retro and The Cutting Room Floor, with links to their articles on R2 scattered about. If you're interested in learning more about R2 and the development of Sonic CD, please check them out! They have a much more informative approach to the subject at large and go into greater depth and detail than I would ever hope to do here (or dare, I wouldn't want to dip into the plagiarism territory)!
Sonic Retro's article on R2 || The Cutting Room Floor's article on Sonic CD
11/06/2024
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