List of Sonic the Hedgehog video games
"Sonic the Hedgehog" is a video game series. It is published by Sega, with entries developed by Sega, Sonic Team, Dimps, SIMS Co., Ltd., BioWare, and Sumo Digital. The series debuted in 1991 with the video game, "Sonic the Hedgehog", released for the Mega Drive video game console (named Genesis in North America). Most "Sonic the Hedgehog" games have either been platform games or released for Sega video game consoles and handheld game consoles (handhelds) dating from the Genesis to the eighth generation of video game consoles (2012–present). However, some of the original games were ported into versions on third-party home consoles and developed by several companies. As of February 2013, the series has collectively sold over 85 million copies worldwide across both the platform games and spin-offs.
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.