Submitted by: Unknown

This is all that remains of "The Desert Level", a zone that has never been playable in any form. Many things are wrong with the picture. Firstly, the position of Sonic on the screen is far too right; secondly it is using the Sonic 1 Sonic style. Most likely this was simply a mock image of what the level could look like, with inserting sprites in different sections without having anything moving. One thing that fascinated many was the Crocodile head at the far right. The crocodile robot and its animations were eventually found in the Sonic 2 BETA ROM.

In the Sonic 2 'Beta', Mystic Cave Zone is under the name "Dust Hill Zone". It is theroised that This Desert Level was named "Dust Hill", but was deleted early in production, and was just never changed to "Mystic Cave".

At the moment it is unknown what the real answer is, due to the flakey memory of the original creator, Brenda Ross.

Another interesting fact was that most of the graphics for the level that were created by Ross were made so that they could be interchangable with a 'Winter Zone' palette. Neither level got even close to becoming part of the final game.