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.
Sega Forever
The initial wave of games were from Sega's Genesis/Mega Drive, Game Gear, and Master System platforms, although they plan on adding games from the SG-1000, Sega Saturn, and Dreamcast platforms as well. During the testing phases of the system, Saturn and Dreamcast games did not perform satisfactorily, though Sega has on-going R&D efforts working on improving them in hopes of future release. Games such as "Panzer Dragoon" are being considered for the service, but could not be successfully emulated in the testing phase, meaning that such a release would hypothetically require a lengthy porting process instead. Sega is also open to releasing games that had not previously had English localizations, such as the Yuji Naka-designed game, "Girl's Garden".