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Sonic the Hedgehog is a franchise of video games released by Sega starring and named after its mascot character Sonic the Hedgehog. more...

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The series began in 1991 with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, in addition to an 8-bit version of the game for the Master System and Game Gear formats. Sonic was responsible for turning Sega into a leading video game company during the 16-bit era, and his first game soon replaced Altered Beast as the default pack-in game for the Mega Drive/Genesis in North America and Europe. As of March 2007, the franchise has sold more than 45 million copies of its individual games.

The Sega division responsible for the first game in the series was called Sonic Team, and the group has since developed many titles in the franchise. Prominent members of its initial staff included programmer Yuji Naka, designer Naoto Ohshima and game planner Hirokazu Yasuhara. Other developers of Sonic games have included Sega Technical Institute, Dimps, BioWare, and Traveller's Tales.

Overview

Nearly all games in the series feature a teenage hedgehog named "Sonic the Hedgehog" as the central player character and protagonist. The games feature Sonic's attempts to save his planet from various threats, primarily the evil genius Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik. The main antagonist throughout the series, Robotnik's aim is to rule the Earth and establish the Eggman Empire; to achieve this, he usually attempts to eliminate Sonic and acquire the powerful Chaos Emeralds. Many English-language Sonic products give Sonic's home as a fictional planet called Mobius, although this is believed to stem from a mistranslated interview with Yuji Naka mentioning the use of Möbius strips in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

1990s

The original four main Sonic titles for the Mega Drive/Genesis, released between 1991 and 1994, were Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. These two dimensional Sonic titles are platform games viewed from a side-on perspective. Their controls are fairly basic and do not deviate much from the genre standard; the selling point of the series is the high-speed gameplay. The series' game engines allow characters to run up walls and ceilings, and roller coaster-like loops and corkscrews are common, as are giant pinball machines with flippers and bumpers which knock Sonic around like a ball. The stages are also similar to roller coasters in that many sequences involve Sonic being thrown along pre-set paths with little input from the player, which has led to criticism that the player can complete a Sonic game merely by holding the pad in one direction. However, the games also feature numerous sections involving more precise jumping to traverse platforms and avoid hazards. In the first three games, it is possible to manually edit levels through use of a code.

Read more at Wikipedia.org