Early Ideas & Cinematics

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:Sonic Heroes.

To do: Just about everything. Refer to the prerelease's main article.

Playable Characters#

A tweet by Shiro Maekawa revealed that characters from Sonic Adventure and SegaSonic the Hedgehog were planned to return, with Metal Sonic also being considered as a playable character, with Shadow being absent since his death hadn't been retconned yet.

"Here are the 18 names in the initial plan for Sonic Heroes, and the team division, as I recall.

Sonic: Tails: Knuckles

Amy: Cream: Rouge

Chaos: E102: Big

Espio: Charmy: Vector.

Fang: Bean: Bark

Metal Sonic: Ray: Mighty"

Team Sonic and Team Chaotix are present in their final incarnations. Team Rose has Rouge instead of Big. Multiple teams were dropped, including:

A team of Chaos, E102-γ, and Big. The presence of Gamma is interesting, as he is destroyed at the end of his story. His post-mortem usage may have inspired Shadow's inclusion in the final.

A team of Fang, Bean, and Bark. They later appeared together as Team Hooligan in the Archie Comics Series, and as illusions in Sonic Mania.

A team of Metal Sonic, Ray, and Mighty. Their next appearance together would be in Sonic Mania's Plus DLC.

Early Intros#

When Sonic Mega Collection Plus was released, all of the movies in the Extras menu were replaced with the storyboards, incomplete and complete intros for Sonic Heroes. Specifically, the game's and Team Dark's.

Game Intro#

• No sounds are included.
• The ground Sonic is running on displays a much different texture than in the final cinematic, reminiscent of Green Hill Zone. This is changed to the Seaside Hill 'Arrow' path in the final cutscene.
• Parts of the animation are still in the storyboarding phase, while others are only partially complete, lacking polish, proper lighting, and texturing.
• Some parts of the animation are played at different speeds than in the final, particularly Sonic grabbing Tails and Knuckles' hands and boosting them forward.
• Team Dark's scene lacks the "team up" scene the final has.
• Team Rose's scene is much shorter.
• Eggman's scene is completely different, with a different animation and background. An extended version of this scene is included in the June 25th 2003 trailer.
• There's an extra shot of islands that wasn't included in the final.
• In the final shot of all the characters coming together, Vector's animation and pose are much different.

Team Dark's Intro#

• There's no music and very little sounds.
• The door is missing the Eggman logo on the front.
• The camera angle of Rouge entering the password was changed, likely due to how awkward it looked.
• Shadow's capsule looks blurrier.
• Omega's vision color is green instead of red. It's also missing markings and doesn't show Shadow's hologram.
• There is an extra bit of animation not present in the final before Rouge looks up and gasps at Shadow.
• Omega's 'HUD' is completely absent while trying to shoot Shadow.

• Omega’s robotic voice has not been implemented yet. This voice clip can actually still be found in the 9.28 prototype (albeit unused), suggesting that this cutscene was finalized around that point in development.
• Shadow's eyes are open before the capsule even finishes draining.
• Shadow's expression after he awakes is different. He also takes longer to rescue Rouge, nor does any explosions appear.
• The ending differs slightly: Shadow's expression when confronted about his amnesia is a defiant turn of his head in the final. In this early cinematic, he hangs his arms low in defeat. There is also a pause after Rouge's final line in which she looks awkward/nervously between Omega and Shadow that is absent in the final.

Early Sonic Heroes Theme#

To do: Try to somehow find an uncompressed version of the early Sonic Heroes theme. The version used here is currently ripped from the Xbox version of Sonic Mega Collection Plus, which was poorly compressed.

Because the intro was included, an early version of the main theme, "Sonic Heroes", was included, which has several differences.

• The song only includes a few lyrics, with many missing spots just having random sounds and gibberish, because Crush 40 made this version to get a feel for the rhythm and lyric timing for their final revision.
• Some of the lyric's timings are different.
• The main guitar is more powerful.

Early Cutscenes#

While the CG cutscenes were finished (with the English audio being in place), the sound mixing wasn't. For one, there are no music or sound effects present.

Metal Sonic Cutscene (Team Sonic)#

To do: Where was this early Metal Sonic cutscene and the other cutscenes originally sourced from? Videos. Also, Team Dark's ending cutscene and an earlier version of Team Chaotix' intro cutscene.

Watch on YouTube

• No music or sound effects can be heard here.

• Metal Sonic's voice, much like Omega's voice in Team Dark's intro cutscene shown above, hasn't been filtered yet.

Vs. Team Sonic Cutscene#

• No sound effects can be heard. Despite this, this cutscene appears to be identical to the final version.

Team Dark's Ending#

Much like the intro cutscene...

• It lacks music or sound effects.
• Omega's robotic voice isn't filtered.

Unique to this is a completely different script for Omega's last dialogue that was altered between then and the 9.28 prototype onward:

Because the early script was included, the last two lines for Omega went through two variations before the final version was settled on.