So one concept that’s been bouncing in my head is a what-if scenario where Gamma survives Adventure 1, but Shadow doesn’t survive Adventure 2, with the Shadow from Heroes onwards indeed being a robotic duplicate.
Fornthe former, Beta doesn’t suckerpunch him and he releases the bird inside himself without blowing his body up. Amy finds him, drags him over for Tails to fix, and Tails installs a chaos drive (or a souped up variation of), due to corrupted memory files he returns to Eggman who upgrades his weaponry and puts him on guard dury.
Shadow Android being a special prototype much more powerful than the other Shadow Androids but was not yet fully programmed by the time Metal Sonic took over.
Rouge finds both, and the plot of Sonic Heroes mostly plays out like normal. Not sure yet how Shadow 05 would play out with this one not being the real one, but I am curious what the dynamics of this new Team Dark would be.