By 1990 Nintendo had Mario and Sega had nobody to match him. Its best effort, Alex Kidd, had not dented the NES, and the Mega Drive was selling on arcade conversions. So Sega set its designers to invent a new hero. The one it chose was a blue hedgehog in red shoes, and the game built around him was about one thing the Mega Drive could do well: move fast. Sonic the Hedgehog came out in the summer of 1991, a few months before the Super Nintendo reached America, and it became the reason many people bought a Sega.
Fast facts
- Developer: Sega, by a team from its AM8 department credited in the game as “Sonic Team Staff”. The team kept the name: Sonic Team.
- Credits: Hirokazu Yasuhara (game plan), Yuji Naka (program), Naoto Ohshima (character design); music by Masato Nakamura of the Japanese pop group Dreams Come True.
- Released: North America, June 1991; Britain, July 1991 at £39.99; Japan, 26 July 1991.
- Platform: Mega Drive (Genesis in North America).
- 8-bit version: a separate game by Ancient for the Master System and Game Gear, late 1991.
- Sales: “over 14 million”, according to Sega’s own Sega Saturn Magazine in 1997.
Designing a hedgehog
Retro Gamer has told the story of the competition twice. Sega’s designers pitched rabbits, armadillos and human characters. The winner came from Naoto Ohshima, who had worked on the first two Phantasy Star games, and was first called Mr Needlemouse. He was coloured Sega blue, the colour of the company’s logo, and designed with an American audience in mind. Ohshima has said that the red shoes came from Santa Claus’s colours and the buckled boots Michael Jackson wore on the cover of Bad. Early concepts gave Sonic fangs, a rock band and a human girlfriend called Madonna; Sega of America’s changes removed them.
Sega then turned to Yuji Naka, a programmer known inside the company for Phantasy Star and a Mega Drive conversion of Ghouls ’n Ghosts, and to Hirokazu Yasuhara, who planned the game and its levels. Naka told Retro Gamer where the idea came from. Playing the first stage of Super Mario Bros., he kept wondering why he could not clear it faster: “This feeling must have been the beginning of the idea of Sonic, as you get good at playing you can run through the stage really fast.”
How it plays
Sonic rewards speed and punishes carelessness. Sonic runs, jumps and curls into a spinning ball that destroys the robots Dr Robotnik (Eggman in the Japanese version) has built around captured animals. Loops, slopes and springs carry him along at a pace the player can barely follow, and each of the six zones, three acts apiece, hides different routes and secret rooms before a final showdown. Rings protect him: touch an enemy while carrying any and he survives but scatters them all; touch one with none and he loses a life. Finish a stage with 50 rings and a giant ring leads to a rotating special stage and one of the Chaos Emeralds.
Green Hill Zone, the first stage, became the game’s picture postcard, with its chequered earth, palm trees and loop-the-loops. Naka said that it “was inspired by California”, and that its colours came from the pop illustrations of Eizin Suzuki. The team hoped for two things it could not finish in time: a split-screen two-player mode, which became the starting point for the sequel, and a sound-select screen showing Sonic’s band. The space left over went on the sampled “SE-GA” voice over the logo.
What the magazines said
The British console press had waited months for it. Mean Machines gave it 92% in July 1991 and called it “the best platform game on the Megadrive”. Paul could not “think of a Megadrive game with more spectacular graphics”, but found “the instant-loss-of-all-rings factor” a little frustrating. His colleague Rich compared it with the Super Famicom’s Super Mario World: Sonic looked better, he wrote, but “just doesn’t have the depth to match Nintendo’s masterpiece”. Computer & Video Games summed it up in three words: “Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant!”
Sonic and the Genesis
Retro Gamer reports that Sega of America worried at first that Americans would not know what a hedgehog was, and that Sega of Japan was reluctant to give the game away with the console. It did in the end. A Sega Visions reader who had bought his Genesis in autumn 1990 noted in 1993 that Sega had since “lowered the price of the system by $70, packed in Sonic the Hedgehog, and now are giving away Sonic 2”. Sega’s advertising leaned on Sonic’s speed. When a reader asked in 1993 whether “Blast Processing” was real, Sega Visions replied that “without it, Sonic would move about as fast as Mario” (the Mega Drive entry explains why that phrase named no real feature).
By 1997 Sega Saturn Magazine was crediting the “original Megadrive game” with “over 14 million copies” and with making Sega a force in a market “previously dominated by Nintendo”. The figure came from Sega’s own magazine, and it does not separate copies sold on their own from those that came free with a console.
The 8-bit Sonic
The Master System and Game Gear got their own Sonic the Hedgehog at the end of 1991. It was not a conversion. Ancient, the Japanese studio run by the composer Yuzo Koshiro, built six new zones, three of them based on the Mega Drive game’s with new layouts, and Koshiro wrote music that mixed Nakamura’s themes with new tunes. Many of the enemies made it across, and all of Sonic’s moves except his block-pushing animation. Retro Gamer judged it “a fine standalone Sonic game, rather than a watered down port”.
No home computer version
Sega kept Sonic on its own machines. When a reader wrote to Commodore Force in February 1993 that a Commodore 64 conversion was on the way, the magazine replied that whoever said so had been “telling porkies”: there would be no Sonic on the C64, “or any other home computer for that matter”. A month earlier it had told another reader: “If you want to play Sonic you’ll have to buy a Sega, which is of course exactly how they want it.” The game did reach PCs, phones and Nintendo’s consoles, but only years later, through Sega’s own re-releases.
What came next
According to Retro Gamer, Naka left Sega soon after the game came out, unhappy with a pay system that rewarded seniority, and Mark Cerny brought him to Sega Technical Institute in California. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 followed on 24 November 1992, launched worldwide on one day. Ohshima led Sonic CD for the Mega-CD in 1993, which added time travel. The team that made the first game kept the name of its hero, and Sonic Team still makes his games. Sonic himself went on to films, and the Sega entry follows him there.
Sources
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega, 1991), Mega Drive, in-game staff credits: “Sonic Team Staff”; Game Plan: Carol Yas (Hirokazu Yasuhara); Program: Yu2 (Yuji Naka); Character Design: BigIsland (Naoto Ohshima); Sound Produce: Masato Nakamura.
- Mean Machines issue 10, July 1991, pp. 42–44: review (Sega, £39.99, released July; 92%; comments by Paul Glancey and Rich).
- Computer & Video Games issue 117, August 1991, p. 16: review (£39.99; “Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant!”).
- Retro Gamer issue 100, March 2012, pp. 46–49: “Sonic the Hedgehog” (June 1991; the character competition; Mr Needlemouse, Madonna and Sega of America’s changes; Naka on Super Mario Bros., Green Hill Zone and Eizin Suzuki; AM8; Nakamura and Dreams Come True; the dropped two-player mode and sound select; Sega of America’s doubts and the Genesis pack-in; the 8-bit version by Ancient and Koshiro).
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 6, 2012, pp. 11–13: “Sonic Boom: the success story of Sonic the Hedgehog” (Sega blue, the American audience, the shoes and Santa Claus; Sonic 2’s worldwide launch on 24 November 1992; Sonic CD and time travel).
- Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, pp. 25–26: company profile of Sonic Team (AM8; Naka’s departure and Mark Cerny’s Sega Technical Institute; Ohshima and Sonic CD).
- Sega Visions, June 1993, letters page: the price cut, the Sonic pack-in and the Sonic 2 giveaway; “without it, Sonic would move about as fast as Mario”.
- Sega Saturn Magazine (UK) issue 22, August 1997, p. 68: “The original Megadrive game sold over 14 million copies.”
- Commodore Force issue 1, January 1993, p. 22, and issue 2, February 1993, p. 24: letters pages.
- Sega Retro, “Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive)” and “Sonic the Hedgehog (8-bit)” (web, secondary): regional release dates. https://segaretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(16-bit) https://segaretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(8-bit)