Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Dead Atmosphere didn’t get publicly shown much before release, but the stage got redesigned quite a few times. There was a 2019 version that was a massively cluttered mess, and a 2020 version that was something of a transitory iteration between 2019 and this version, though I don’t have any video of either of these on me.
This version was the first that began to resemble the final, though you’ll notice some big differences. One is the intro, with the Avatar grinding by wrecked ships in space, which got scrapped due to technical issues with the lighting in later versions. There’s also the extremely cramped 2D sections, which are basically a holdover from earlier versions of the level. Most noticeable are the visuals, which have a sleeker silver and purple look, instead of the crumbling aesthetic with dense orange fog that the final has. There’s also a lot more platforming in the last 3D section, some portions of which wound up getting restored in the Jump Update, since the physics became reasonably capable of handling it there.
You might have also noticed that these early visuals look a lot like the core room in the “Heart of the Beast” cutscene, which is because the art in that scene was in fact based on this version of the level. Most of that cutscene's art was finished years ahead of the stage itself, and we didn't really have the time/resources to redo it, though since nobody seemed to notice the inconsistency it wasn't too big a deal.
Dead Atmosphere didn’t get publicly shown much before release, but the stage got redesigned quite a few times. There was a 2019 version that was a massively cluttered mess, and a 2020 version that was something of a transitory iteration between 2019 and this version, though I don’t have any video of either of these on me.
This version was the first that began to resemble the final, though you’ll notice some big differences. One is the intro, with the Avatar grinding by wrecked ships in space, which got scrapped due to technical issues with the lighting in later versions. There’s also the extremely cramped 2D sections, which are basically a holdover from earlier versions of the level. Most noticeable are the visuals, which have a sleeker silver and purple look, instead of the crumbling aesthetic with dense orange fog that the final has. There’s also a lot more platforming in the last 3D section, some portions of which wound up getting restored in the Jump Update, since the physics became reasonably capable of handling it there.
You might have also noticed that these early visuals look a lot like the core room in the “Heart of the Beast” cutscene, which is because the art in that scene was in fact based on this version of the level. Most of that cutscene's art was finished years ahead of the stage itself, and we didn't really have the time/resources to redo it, though since nobody seemed to notice the inconsistency it wasn't too big a deal.
