You’ve probably seen this tweet making the rounds online of unused Sonic 2 music being shown off to a classroom.
My teacher showing off music he did for Sonic 2 that didn’t make it into the game pic.twitter.com/jL0bohyXIO
— Kevin Slackie (@KSlackie) May 1, 2019
It turns out this student’s professor is David Javelosa who, if you aren’t familiar with him, is a freelance composer who used to be an Audio Director at SEGA of America. These days you’ll find him as a professor at Santa Monica College. You will typically find his name on western productions of SEGA titles including Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Ecco – The Tides of Time, Spider-Man VS. The Kingpin and even was part of the SEGA Multimedia Studio to help with SEGA CD development.
After the tweet gained massive popularity the poster agreed to try to convince David to put his works online somewhere. Luckily he agreed to it and now you can find this online. A SEGA Genesis GEMS Test Module. GEMS of course was the sound driver used in many western Genesis games including Sonic Spinball. But in the video below it seems to center around Sonic 2. You can find more demo reels and music tracks from this channel after the jump.
Obviously none of the music ever made it into the game and given the copyright of 1993, its a year after Sonic 2 made it’s way to market and was likely intended for the Sonic title landing on the Genesis in 1993 which turned out to be Sonic Spinball. That said the video also shows sound modules for several other games including the previously mentioned Ecco 2 along with sound reels for X-Men, the SEGA Channel, which the channel had previously shown off a prototype cartridge in action, and unreleased games such as Baby Boom, a cancelled Mega Drive/Genesis game from the Ecco developers. As of today before the article went live, the channel uploaded a song from said game which is a rendition of Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse. As for this Sonic 2 module, for some reason it seems oddly similar to this Holiday Special about a galactic war in a galaxy far far away. Or maybe I’m just trying to loosely connect Sonic with Bea Arthur.
Anyway David has been no stranger for the retro community and has noted that more songs will make their way in the coming days. In the meantime go check out that channel and be sure to read up more on David Javelosa on SEGA Retro.
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