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A Couple Spyro 2 Press Discs (Part 1)

Hello! It's been a while!

I've just released a handful of new press media discs as part of “Project Eclipse 2”, and amongst these are two Spyro 2 discs.

The two discs are a "Hi-Res" artwork disc, and a more general press disc, both dated to July 1999:

Let's go over the content on these, starting with the artwork disc:

Hi-Res Disc

This disc has some high resolution artwork and nothing else.

There's a few well known renders on here, as well as some more obscure ones. For example, have you ever seen this one of Spyro's superfly ability?

Here's one of Spyro taken shortly before he runs me over with his car. For some reason, the file is called "SNABISCO".

The images are all in TIF format, which means sometimes there's extra layers in the images, including additional transparency layers hinting at earlier designs. Take a look and see what you can find!

You can get this asset disc for yourself here.

Press Disc

Next up is the Spyro 2 "press disc"... both of the discs are usually referred to as press discs, but this one is explicitly called the "press disc", so I apologise for how confusing that name is.

There's a lot of weird corporate stuff on this disc, which I'll skip over in this post. There's also a handful of written documents in here. There's nothing massively new in any of them, but I do like this claim about Spyro 2's powerups:

Introduction of new powerup system for special powers on each level: superfly, supercharge, superbounce, superspit, supershield and superfreeze

Internally they called superflame "superspit". Something I didn't know was that they call the invincibility powerup "supersheild", though in hindsight I guess it's not a surprise.

The bulk of this disc is images - artwork and screenshots of the game. Let's briefly go over the renders first, because they're interesting.

So there's this horrifying unfinished one. I don't want to look at this one for much longer so I won't say much about it:

This disc also has a photoshop image file (RUN.TIF) which has been named with the wrong file extension, for some reason. You can open it in supporting image editing programs to reveal what it really looks like:

There's a small handful of level renders, too:

A lot of the screenshots on this disc have been seen before, so much of this is nothing new. A lot seem to be totally unique, though, or at the very least were not used very often anywhere else, so they've got a handful of surprises to show us.

Every screenshot is identified as S2SSX.TIF where X is a number from 1 to 190. 185 screenshots are on this disc - though screenshots 4, 5, 6, 7 and 103 (???) are seemingly missing.

This starts off with a few renders I've not seen used very often. Nothing too special, but nice to see more of Summer Forest at this stage:

Oh, but what's this? There seems to be something missing here. Where's the Colossus portal?

It seems to be over here. I like where they moved it to, putting it right next to the Idol Springs portal would have been a little boring.

Elora's in a slightly different spot in some of these. Rather than standing in the doorway to the castle, she's here to greet you as soon as you leave Glimmer, just like in the cutscene.

Moneybags is also here to greet us, for some reason. It seems he'd be the one to teach Spyro to glide - a bit out of character for him, so I can see why they'd change this.

Glimmer's skybox - and I think some of its textures and lighting - seem to be different. It gives the level a really strange vibe, but maybe a little too gloomy for the first level.

The HUD looks a little different in this version. It's subtle, but the gem counter icon is a bit more rounded. I think the earliest demo had this oddity, too.

The first of the Idol Springs screenshots slaps us over the face with this bizarre structure. Although it may not be obvious at first glance, nothing like this doorway exists in the final game. This building is where Spyro plays the light up boxes game, but usually the only way to enter is through an underwater tunnel. This easy entrance was replaced with a totally flat wall.

And here's the end of the level, in case you thought that building in the previous screenshot was this one.

We get another view of the doorway here, as well as a strange grating that the river passes through.

These two screenshots of the hula girl area are a little weird. It looks like Spyro's trying to speak to this guy, and there seems to be some sort of step behind Spyro in the first image.