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 Blast
"Sonic Blast" was released worldwide in November 1996, and in Japan as part of the Kid's Gear brand on December 13, 1996, retitled "G Sonic". Worldwide, it was the last Sega-published Game Gear game; it was the system's final game outright in Japan. Though it has a similar title and was released around the same time, "Sonic Blast" and "Sonic 3D Blast" have little in common. The game is fairly common in North America, but "G Sonic" is extremely rare, costing almost 350. A port of the game was released for the Master System exclusively in Brazil in December 1997, distributed by Tectoy. The game had to be simplified to run on the Master System because of its lower graphical quality. Like "G Sonic", the Master System version of "Sonic Blast" is rare.