Sonic The Hedgehog

The Sonic the Hedgehog series is a franchise of video games released by Sega starring their mascot character Sonic the Hedgehog. The series began in 1991 with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. An 8-bit version of the game was also released for the Master System and Game Gear formats. Sonic was responsible for turning Sega into a leading video game company early in the 16-bit era, and his first game soon replaced Altered Beast as the default pack-in game for the Genesis in North America and Europe.

As of June 2011, the franchise had sold more than 80 million units, making the series the 10th best-selling video game franchise of all time.

Games in the series are developed by Sonic Team, with the exception of some spin-offs that were independently developed by Sega of America. The main programmer for the first game was Yuji Naka, who would later become head of the Sonic Team division, and the game planner was Hirokazu Yasuhara but stopped producing games for the franchise. The music of the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Mega Drive/Genesis were composed by Masato Nakamura of the Japanese band Dreams Come True.

Yuji Naka, Hirokazu Yasuhara and Naoto Oshima stopped producing games for Sonic. Yuji Naka became the head of his own franchise, Prope and Yasuhara moved to Namco a gaming company. As of current, Takashi Iizuka is the head of Sonic Team and has been involved in several current Sonic games. Most of his involvement was/is in Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, he took very little involvement in the Storybook series. Currently, most of the music is done by SEGA Sound Team or Crush 40.