Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure
In August 1999, SNK announced that they were collaborating with Sega to develop a "Sonic the Hedgehog" game for their Neo Geo Pocket Color handheld system. The game was developed by SNK, with supervision from Yuji Naka and Sonic Team at Sega. This marked the first time Sega was directly involved in the development of a "Sonic" game for a non-Sega platform. The team planned for "Sonic Pocket Adventure" to be a return to the classic 2D gameplay style found in the "Sonic" games on the Sega Genesis. In particular, many game design and visual elements are borrowed from "Sonic 2". The game's background music tracks are also 8-bit renditions of music from "Sonic 3". "Sonic Pocket Adventure" was released first in North America on December 4, 1999. SNK released a system bundle with the game included for the holiday season. The game was released in Japan two weeks later, and in Europe in February 2000.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sega launched a $10 million advertising campaign for "Sonic the Hedgehog 2"s release. Sega sought a global release date to make the game available in all stores on the same day, a fairly novel concept at the time. This required Sega to reconfigure its distribution system to ensure that games were available in all major stores. The release date, Tuesday, November 24, 1992 was marketed as "Sonic 2s day". While the Genesis release in North America and the Mega Drive release in Europe both released the game on this day, Sega made the game available a few days before in Japan on November 21, 1992. 400,000 copies of "Sonic 2" were sold in the first seven days after release and over 6 million in the lifespan of the console (only 180,000 of which were in Japan).