Sonic Team
The initial team formed in 1990 and was composed of developers from Sega's Consumer Development division, including programmer Yuji Naka, artist Naoto Ohshima, and level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara. The team took the name Sonic Team in 1991 with the release of "Sonic the Hedgehog" for the Sega Genesis. The game was a major success that contributed to millions of Genesis sales. The next "Sonic" games were developed by Naka and Yasuhara in America at Sega Technical Institute, while Ohshima worked on "Sonic CD" in Japan. Naka returned to Japan in late 1994 to become the head of CS3, later renamed R&D #8. During this time, the division took on the Sonic Team brand but developed games that do not feature Sonic, such as "Nights into Dreams" (1996) and "Burning Rangers" (1998).
Sonic Mega Collection
"Mega Collection" was developed by Sonic Team, the studio behind most games in the "Sonic" series. According to director Yojiro Ogawa, Sonic Team's goal with the compilation was to introduce children to older games in the series and showcase what made "Sonic" successful. Sonic Team chose to focus on including all the Genesis "Sonic" games. Rather than porting them from the Genesis, they collaborated with VR-1 Japan to develop an emulator to run the games' ROM images. Series co-creator Yuji Naka, who served as producer, said the team intended to include the 1993 Sega CD game "Sonic CD", but storage constraints prevented this. Sonic Team also considered including BlueSky Software's "Vectorman" (1995), and "Sonic R" (1997) and "Sonic Shuffle" (2000) were expected to appear in "Mega Collection" at one point. "CD", "Vectorman", and "R" later appeared in "Sonic Gems Collection" (2005), a successor to "Mega Collection" focusing on rare "Sonic" games. Sonic Team had trouble gathering materials for the compilation because it had been a decade since they made the games and "Sega's not that good about keeping history." For instance, Naka wanted to include the original prototype of the first game but Sonic Team could not find its ROM image.