Sonic the Hedgehog (universe): Difference between revisions

By 1988, [[Sega]] had released its 16-bit successor to the Sega Master System, the Mega Drive, worldwide. It was renamed as the {{s|wikipedia|Sega Genesis}} for its North American release due to Sega's inability to secure legal rights to the Mega Drive name in the region. Nintendo's flagship {{uv|Mario}} franchise was at the height of its worldwide commercial success, with the recent release of ''Super Mario Bros. 3'' in Japan, a week before the Mega Drive's launch, and both the North American releases of Nintendo's own 16-bit system, the Super Famicom, renamed as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and one of its launch titles, ''Super Mario World'', would be released in mid-1991. Sega made a conscious effort to directly compete against Nintendo's powerful brand with a reliance on a new mascot for both the console and the company itself, one that would help sell systems and broaden its market demographic, and thus began development of its own platformer in April 1990 (two months after the North American release of ''Super Mario Bros. 3''). The game placed an emphasis on horizontally-lengthy levels that could be navigated with a player-character that could run and roll through at a high velocity, with movements that were dictated by elements of momentum-based physics. The original concept for an emphasis on speed was that most video games in the 1980s did not have save files, and thus players would often memorize level patterns and attempt to speed through them as fast as possible to make any real progress. The screen scrolled as fast as it needed to keep up; it was a very technically difficult process to create the game's graphics engine so that it could allow this speed without sacrificing graphical clarity. The end result was the worldwide debut of the eponymous character [[Sonic the Hedgehog]], whose game was released in June 23, 1991 in North America, 2 months ahead of the SNES's launch in the region.