The GHZ Forum

I thought Ancient had long since disbanded, but they are still kicking with a blog no less. To celebrate the release of M2's awesome Bare Knuckles II 3DS port, they have posted the design docs for the original Mega Drive game.

It's mostly in Japanese, but there are some brilliant sketches. Well worth downloading.

Streets of Rage seems to be experiencing a renaissance of late. Axel is appearing in the 3DS RPG 'Project X Zone 2', which I think is the first time he has been playable since SOR3.

The sound track is also being remastered by Yuzo Koshiro. In an unrelated project, Koshiro has been posting Famicom remixes of his tunes on Sound Cloud.

Has anyone from Ancient ever discussed the Master System Sonic 1, or why they didn't work on the sequels?

The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers: Volume 1 actually has several pages of interview with Ancient about the Sonic games. I haven't got a copy, but you can read most of the Sonic pages on the Amazon sneak peak.

Yuzo Koshiro confirms that the Game Gear version was made before the Master System, which I find confusing, as the game feels like it was designed for a larger screen.

Speaking on Reddit, Al Nilsen said that Streets of Rage didn't do that well in Japan and so the sequels were made as SOA's insistence. Therefore, it could be possible that Ancient became too busy to work on the Sonic games.