That knock-back mechanic would have ruined the game. Cool to see a feature that was explored, tested, and cut for the right reasons.

I was the artist who created Hidden Palace Zone and Oil Ocean Zone. I don't know if anyone was as excited as I was to have HPZ finally included in an official release of Sonic!!

Fun fact, Sonic 2 was developed in only 9 months. The game had almost 50 bug testers. That's more than twice the size of most dev teams that worked on any Sonic game. Despite this, Sonic 2 wasn't a fully playable game till two days before completion.

"Finally though Hidden Palace was Included in Sonic Origins!"

I was always screaming at those kids on Nick's Arcade that they are playing the games wrong!

So at some point they probably realized that the best solution for Tails was just to make him immortal, and because of that they had to remove him from the final battle so people wouldn't abuse it.

the hidden palace zone actually made it into the sonic 2 remake for mobile.

Bumping into the wall was likely made specifically for the Nick Arcade version, because I don't see anyone at Sega during this period thinking that was a good idea for the final game. They were on a time limit and whatnot, so anything to make it more difficult to get X amount of rings

These sorts of things are pretty common in the high stakes console world, where very tight release schedules sometimes limit what can be included in a game. Some ideas have to be abandoned because there simply isn't enough time to implement them. No doubt Sega programmers were feeling the heat as the release date for Sonic 2 was approaching and they still have to debug, play test and manufacture the cartridges. Better to release a solid smaller game than a larger buggy game, especially in an age where ROM updates were not possible and the internet didn't exist yet.

6:36 The reason why the game crashes in Final Zone is because when you try to progress, the game will try to access the Sonic 1 Final Zone data which is not there.

Prototype Sonic 2 looks so cute and adorable.

Debug mode, man! Use debug mode!

Coming across the original Sonic 2 Beta online in the early 2000s was something else, so many levels were cut from the final that were present in that beta version that it was just mind blowing at the time. I don't think any other prototype has had the same impact that one had in the early days of the internet.

very suprising that the sonic 2 prototype running sprites were actually way smoother than the ones we got