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 the Hedgehog (8-bit video game)
Porting the original game to the 8-bit hardware was impossible, so Ancient built their "Sonic" from scratch. The team decided to make their version completely different from its Genesis counterpart. According to Koshiro, the game had three phases of development. In the first phase, Ancient developed the game with the Genesis version in mind. The second and third phases were largely Ancient's own ideas, with Sega supervising their work. Koshiro thought reinventing "Sonic" for 8-bit hardware was challenging, as he did not work at Sega and had never developed a game before. However, Sega had faith in him because of his relationship to the company. Koshiro composed the soundtrack and sought to retain the feel of the Genesis version. He converted Masato Nakamura's 16-bit "Sonic" score to the 8-bit programmable sound generator to start, but ended up using only three of those tracks; the remainder of the music is Koshiro's work.