8 Video Games With Playable Cut Content

3. Sonic The Hedgehog 2

Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic 2
Sega

Yuji Naka and the rest of Sonic Team had a wealth of location ideas for their little Blue Hog to visit on his second Mega Drive outing. So many, in fact, that a handful of Zones were conceived and prototyped before being cut or left unfinished.

Hidden Palace Zone - restored, per Sega's blessing, with Christian Whitehead's iOS port - is the most famous of those locales left on the cutting room floor, but by no means the only long-lost content. In the full release, they're nothing but bug infested, discarded remnants, but Dust & Wood Hill Zone, along with the more enigmatically named Genocide City, once had a spot reservation on Sonic 2's level select screen.

The prototype (above) owes its name to Simon Wai, a Sonic fan who discovered the work-in-progress ROM on a Chinese website and subsequently publicized its existence to the wider fan base.

Today, getting hold of the prototype is as easy as punching the relevant phrase into a search engine, so if you're okay with battling broken code and unfinished scripts for the sake of experiencing Sonic 2's earliest iterations, you know what to do.

Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.