Sonic art 1997

When I was in the eighth grade, my family moved back from Libby Montana to Ellensburg Washington, and I began a really long-lived correspondence with my best friend from Libby. The "star" of these letters were the envelopes, which we'd do "envelope art" on like we'd seen in the letters column of so many game magazines. Yesterday I was visiting that friend and he had just got all his old stuff back from Montana that he had in storage, including most (not all!) of those letters and envelopes, so we went though and mainly just looked at envelopes. There was a definite recognizable "path of improvement" as my colored pencil skills got better (and my prismacolors got worn down!), seeing it transition from just copies of pictures from Gamefan with flat colors to original poses with heavy shading and really thick application of color. I scanned a few of these back in the day, but in general I found that they didn't look very good when scanned and didn't keep many of them.

These are fairly early, and were part of a "pitch" for a 2D Saturn Sonic (strange that it was 1997--I am sure I was planning it earlier than that!) with some level concepts. Notes on the paper indicate that these look "nothing like I wanted" or "not very sonic-like" but I can definitely remember being really proud of them. These were drawn specifically to be sent to my friend, so I apparently didn't have any real qualms with folding up the page they were on and sticking them in an envelope (the folds are visible).

Anyway, I felt this in particular was a thing that needed to go on my DA page. Nothing like admitting your plans for what would surely have been "the best" Sonic game possible (I remember writing up a huge document and emailing it to Sonic Team, which of course I'm sure they ignored completely). Anyway, these are the levels I had drawn:

The Train Zone, where you would alternate chasing after Eggman's train and also riding on it.

Unnamed Highway Zone, which was supposed to be built out of 3D polygons and the idea was that it would spin crazily and appear really complex as you moved through it with a 2.5D-type camera. When I thought of this, I'd never seen a game like Klonoa (or even NiGHTS, though obviously I had played it by the time I drew this) so I remember it being a difficult thing to explain, but noted in the description "you can see the 3D effect," and you can.... sort of...

And Disaster Zone, which was supposed to have dynamic platforms collapsing and rising up from below or tilting or whatever as you ran through (and also lots of explosions and stuff--meteors falling, etc). I don't think I ever saw anything in a 2D game that matched my vision for this until New Super Mario Bros Wii, or possibly Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (some crazy platforms in that game!).