The GHZ Forum

No, not some weird church or something; this seems to be the official in-house documentation for Sonic for Western audiences before SA1 happened and retcon'd everything. Nemesis from Sonic Retro managed to get his hands on a (apparently incomplete) copy:

Nemesis wrote:Dean Sitton (posting as DeanSatan), a former employee of SOA, and the guy who came up with the name "Ivo Robotnik", popped onto this forum awhile back. See this thread for details.

Dean had a variety of documents from his time at Sega, a number of them related to Sonic, including several versions of something called the "Sonic Bible". I bought them. They arrived today. I've started scanning them.

The Sonic Bible was an internal document created by SOA to provide a localised history and overall philosophy for Sonic and the Sonic universe. It is apparently not based on the Japanese history. According to Dean: "the bible was developed at soa in-tune with getting the game from soj - there was little to no exposure to the original japanese fiction at that time".

http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDri ... cBible.pdf

There's some "drafts" as well:

http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDri ... Draft1.pdf
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDri ... Draft2.pdf

He also says there's more stuff coming soon - whether or not that's from the same document, I'm not sure.

So it was written by people who had nothing to do with the creation of the game it is about.

Also I saw the word Kintobor when looking through it.

I think I will skip on reading it.

Very, very interesting. So this is where the UK comic's background originated from, along with all other spinoffs. It looks like the 'bible's' story was revised a bit in the subsequent product drafts. What's also remarkable is that they approached it as if it could stand on its own as a fantasy story, rather than cheap filler for the marketing department.

The Grey Emerald was the weirdest part. The way it was described made it clear that it wasn't one of the six Chaos Emeralds from the video game, despite one of those six emeralds actually looking "grey" (white, officially). To make things weirder a seventh Chaos Emerald did turn up in the sequel, although it wasn't referenced at all in the plot! It really makes me appreciate how well Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson handled things in Sonic the Comic.

I'm a little bit surprised that there was no mention of South Island. It was one of the few parts of the Japanese Sonic lore that made its way into Sonic the Comic, so it must have been filtered through somewhere.

FLICKY THE DUCK.

I'm sorry, but I had to pause reading for a moment and get that off of my chest.

Flicky the Duck. Not to mention he's the only one with an actual name, the rest are just stripped down to their species.

Also, Sonic likes and I quote, "watching shapely hedgehogettes stroll by". Funny that Amy suddenly sprouting breasts didn't seem to grab any of his attention.

Neo wrote:FLICKY THE DUCK.

I'm sorry, but I had to pause reading for a moment and get that off of my chest.

They also called Rocky a seal in the first draft.

Neo wrote:Flicky the Duck. Not to mention he's the only one with an actual name, the rest are just stripped down to their species.

They have names in the later draft (Johnny Lightfoot, Tux etc). Interestingly they mentioned that the seven of them have large families as a way to explain the multiples found in each game. Makes more sense than dozens of pigs all called Porker Lewis I suppose. Until Sonic 3D (or perhaps Tails Adventures?) came along the Japanese texts and the actual games themselves were rather ambiguous about whether Flicky, Pecky, Rocky etc were the names of the entire species or specific individuals who were Sonic's friends.

Crazy Penguin wrote:They also called Rocky a seal in the first draft.

Rocky is easily mistakable for a seal if you don't know better. After all, other animals have creative liberties in their design -- such as Pecky's golden locks. Rocky's mustache could easily be an accessory to the animal's normal look.

Feathers are about the only thing Flicky and ducks have in common.

Crazy Penguin wrote:They have names in the later draft (Johnny Lightfoot, Tux etc). Interestingly they mentioned that the seven of them have large families as a way to explain the multiples found in each game. Makes more sense than dozens of pigs all called Porker Lewis I suppose. Until Sonic 3D (or perhaps Tails Adventures?) came along the Japanese texts and the actual games themselves were rather ambiguous about whether Flicky, Pecky, Rocky etc were the names of the entire species or specific individuals who were Sonic's friends.

Yeah, I was reading the first draft. By the time we get to the second one, Flicky has been requalified as a bluebird.

I guess I really didn't care much for the existance of dozens of identical animals. Whenever they were expressed as more than a 16x16 sprite bouncing on the screen (such as official illustrations, etc), there's only one of each, so I guess I can just disregard their multitude of clones. The "numerous familiies" reasoning is actually a good one, though.

I only ever considered the names being the species' name in the case of "Flicky", due to Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island. But apart from that to me Flicky is the name of the blue bird and no more.

It's pretty much the same thing as Toad and Yoshi in the Mario series. The Toad you play as in Super Mario Bros 2/USA could very well be completely different to the one you play as in Super Mario Kart. Though things got really crazy when they started throwing around multiple Donkey Kong Juniors!

Oh, here's the line I was thinking of from Tails Adventures:

Tails Adventures wrote:"Tails! Tails! Big trouble!' a small Flicky bird shouted to Tails.

I'm not in the slightest bit familiar with Japanese, but that's how G Silver translated it, so assuming that the original version was unambiguous it seems that the idea of Flicky as a species rather than a character specific name pre-dated Sonic 3D. There was even one piece of official art that featured a standard Flicky, but coloured green.

Wow, this is fucking far out.

Sonny Hedgehog was born on Earth in the early 21st century, in the town of Hardly, Nebraska, population 1,226.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Silly SoA! Hedgehogs aren't native to North America.

I find it interesting that Sega of America originally established that Sonic's world is actually Earth and that he lived in Nebraska to boot. Also funny is that he really acted "hedgehog-ish" except being bipedal. This Sonic Bible reads like a strange children's book.

It's really interesting to think what the continunity might've become if this were the actual background for Sonic 1.

This is probably the most interesting Sonic story to come to my attention in the last 10 years. I like the use of the egg to preserve some of the Japanese origin.