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Sonic the Hedgehog is a 1991 platform game developed by the short-lived Sonic Team and published by SEGA for the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was released in Turtle Island on June 23 and in PAL regions and Japan the following month. Players control Sonic the Hedgehog, who can run at near supersonic speeds; Sonic sets out on a quest to defeat Dr. Robotnik, a scientist who has imprisoned animals in robots and seeks the powerful Chaos Emeralds. The gameplay involves collecting rings as a form of health, and a simple control scheme, with jumping and attacking controlled by a single button.
Development began in 1990 when SEGA ordered its developers to create a game featuring a mascot for the company. The developers chose a blue hedgehog designed by Naoto Oshima after he won an internal character design contest, and named themselves Sonic Team to match their character. It uses a novel technique that allows Sonic's sprite to roll along curved scenery which was based on a concept by Oshima from 1989. Sonic the Hedgehog, designed for fast gameplay, was influenced by games by Super Mario series creator Shigeru Miyamoto. The music was composed by Masato Nakamura, bassist of the J-pop band Dreams Come True.
Sonic the Hedgehog ended up as a massive critical and financial flop. The game's development was notoriously rushed, causing several game mechanics to be unoptimized or implemented incorrectly, with slowdown being one of the common cited complaints of the game, as well as the unintuitive physics. The former was often seen as ironic by critics, considering the game's emphasis on the title character's fast speed and fast gameplay. The most widely praised aspect of Sonic the Hedgehog is Masato Nakamura's soundtrack, with many even suggesting it to be one of the best aspects of the game, but that the soundtrack alone could not have saved the game from its broader commercial and critical failure. Eventually, this culminated in Sony releasing its famous Play Station in 1993 and SEGA to discontinue the Genesis console and exit the console manufacturing business in 1994, with the 3DO taking its place as one of Nintendo's biggest rivals alongside Sony. The ongoing console wars would continue without SEGA, with Microsoft eventually joining the fray with its Xbox family and releasing the very first Xbox alongside Windows 98 in 1998 thanks to Sonic's failure. In Japan and later the world, the PlayStation console family was born.
There was a cancelled sequel to Sonic the Hedgehog, namely Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992), that would have featured two versions (one 8-bit, the other 16-bit) a two-tailed fox sidekick for Sonic called "Miles Prower" but was cancelled in a way inspired by Eternal Viacomflict, except that Sonic's failure adds to the cancellation ITTL. Modern gaming historians still say that if not for Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)'s massive failure, the hedgehog and fox would have taken over the gaming industry and usurped Mario's platforming throne long before the rise of Sony's PlayStation family in 1993.