I'll get that hedgehog

I have pioneered new levels in accidentally stealing things. It seems that a lot of the time recently, I'll release a song and quickly be told that the tune is rather a lot like song X or shares the same title with song Y, which are both on the latest release I don't have from power metal band Z, but this is quite special.

It would be very difficult to deny that the Crystal Towers 2 level Walnut Creek, shown in the title banner here, was slightly inspired by the grassy, inexplicably-chequered first levels of the Sonic games (and the look of it just now actually came about after I'd spent quite a while trying to make it more graphically distinct) - that level of borrowing from another game is obvious. But I'd got the name for the level in a way that I thought was unique - when writing the first game, I had seen the name on a sign for a nearby town while being driven away from San Francisco airport for the first time, and instantly thought that it was the best Green Hill-like platform game level name ever.

A few days ago I was caught reading the bug list on http://www.sonicretro.org because of making a comment on dr_dos's journal describing how I got caught reading the bug list on http://www.sonicretro.org, and found that according to the level designers:

Visually speaking, through all three games, we always start with an island. At the time, we were developing in San Francisco, and south of there was a town(?) called Emerald Hill. We were doing a location test at a shopping center there when we saw it, and since it was a Green Hill-like name we thought well, let's use it in the game!

I never thought that I could be that non-original with quite so much geographical accuracy.