Three alternate versions of Sonic tracks appeared as part of Sega Music Collection, a collection of BGMs from several Mega Drive titles which was distributed digitally in Japan via the Sega Game Toshokan dial-up service.Īs heard in this videotape recording of a user's online session with the service, this version of Green Hill's BGM matches the recording of the Tokyo Toy Show '90 demo music, and all three tracks match the BGM for the Tera Drive store demo.Īll three tracks have noticeable differences compared to the final game's BGM. The stage select text is positioned upwards, too, possibly because of the lack of slots like Final Zone. It's possible that Scrap Brain/Clock Work Act 3 had the boss fight in it, similar to the other Acts. Some acts have Xs listed after them (possibly to mark if they were incomplete), and Final Zone is missing from the list. Later on, the palette got changed to the final's sepia-tone feel. The stage select once used a bluish-grey palette instead of a sepia-tone one. (Interestingly, this title screen heavily resembles the one from the 8-bit versions.) Since the title screen shares the same art/palettes as Green Hill, it used to have the differently detailed background in early pre-release materials before it got adjusted to resemble the final's background not too long afterwards.

This makes it unlikely that anyone would confuse the two.The title screen of the build shown at the Tokyo Toy Show has a smaller banner (and 'SONIC' text). Well, as for Tails, frame $56 is significantly different from his standing sprite, which is nearly unchanged from the one in Sonic 2. So how come the other characters don't suffer from this kind of mix-up? Much later, someone naïvely takes the first sprite in this sheet, blows the pixels up to the size of Legos, and uses them to win an argument on the Internet. Someone comes along to make a rudimentary sprite rip, finds frame $56 long before reaching frame $BA, so they push it to the top of their sprite sheet. Meanwhile, as we recently saw, the actual standing pose is all the way over at mapping frame $BA. Well, as I pointed out back then, the standing rotation sprites take up mapping frames $55 through $5B.

Okay, but how did this relatively obscure sprite end up in the comparison? This sprite just happens to be slightly different from the regular standing sprite, namely with respect to Sonic's left shoe, his mouth, and his gaze, which does indeed look a bit cross-eyed.

Sonic 1 title sprite