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Who is Sonic?
Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game franchise created and owned by Sega, and is the company's flagship series. The franchise was created mainly by the company's Japanese developers; Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara, to compete in entertainment, specifically the video game market. The mainline installments are usually platformers mostly developed by Sonic Team; spin-off games, often outsourced to other studios, encompass a variety of other genres. The series also includes printed media, animations, films, and merchandise. Sonic's recurring elements include a ring-based health system, level locales such as Green Hill Zone, and fast-paced gameplay. The games typically feature Sonic setting out to stop Eggman's schemes for world domination, and the player navigates levels that include springs, slopes, bottomless pits, and vertical loops. Later games added a large cast of characters.
The franchise as a whole made its debut on 21 June 1991 with the release of the titular Sega Mega Drive/Genesis title Sonic the Hedgehog, to provide Sega with a mascot to compete with Nintendo's highly-successful Super Mario franchise (which resulted in a fierce business rivalry in North America throughout the decade). The success of the game was responsible for turning Sega into a leading video game company during the early 1990s. The next few mainline games were developed by Sega Technical Institute, and a number of spin-offs were released for the Sega Master System and Game Gear. Following a hiatus during the Sega Saturn era, the first mainline 3D game in the series, Sonic Adventure, was released in 1998 on the Sega Dreamcast. In 2001, after the release of Sonic Adventure 2, Sega exited the first-party console market and shifted to third-party development, with the series being continued on Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation consoles, personal computers, mobile devices and arcades.