The world’s most famous hedgehog speeds through two successful decades of gaming!
TOKYO (January 5, 2011) – SEGA® Corporation is proud to announce their company mascot will celebrate his 20th anniversary on June 23, 2011.
From the first day of the release of Sonic The Hedgehog™ back in 1991 on the SEGA Mega Drive console (Genesis for North America), Sonic the Hedgehog quickly became a popular gaming icon due to his super fast speed and his cool, edgy character. In the twenty years that the video games have been available, Sonic the Hedgehog has notched up over 70 million units sold worldwide.
Considering we don’t cover Madcatz around these parts, I’m only posting this because the picture just seems so wrong. I was in Middle / High school during the Nintendo SEGA console wars and if someone would have told me that someday SEGA would be making games on a Nintendo system, let alone approving the use of their mascot for a charger for a Nintendo controller, I would have said they were full of poop.
Even looking at that thing now it’s hard to believe. Not that it bothers me, I was firmly on the Nintendo side of things, but it just seems really strange.
SEGA has come back to the business of making video game hardware with the announcement of their upcoming “Toylets” game system. These displays are positioned above a public urinal and activated by sensors in the urinal that detect the user’s “stream”. By gauging the “stream pressure” users can play the following games:
Manneken Pis, measures the amount of urine
Graffiti Eraser, graffiti on a wall is removed with a hose
The North Wind and Her, use the north wind to try and blow the dress off a girl (stronger urine pressure = stronger wind)
Milk from Nose, two sumo characters blow milk out of their nose to try and push their opponent out of the ring (stronger urine pressure = stronger milk stream)
Toylet is still in development with no release date mentioned. It’s also very unlikely that SEGA would bring this to the U.S., but one can dream.
Eurogamer: The review scores came in and no doubt they were a bit lower than you hoped. Was there a lot of deflation in the office?
Keith Hladik: We were pleased with the first announcement of the sales. I don’t recall exactly, but it was about 100,000 for the first few weeks. Coming from where we were at – we’re an independent studio and this is our first IP – we had pretty decent sales and the reviews were fair.
I don’t recall anyone being down. We already knew we were going to make a sequel, so the fallout from that was we were determined to make the sequel way better than the first one.
Eurogamer: Obviously the original didn’t exactly sell millions of copies. How did you get the sequel green-lit? Was it locked in before the first game was even out?
Kevin Sheller: It was always a two-game contract.
Eurogamer: Regarding online, there were hacking and exploits going on with the first game. How are you managing that for the sequel?
Keith Hladik: Of the exploits that people found and did YouTube clips of, we fixed those. As for the hacking stuff, I obviously can’t divulge exactly what we’ve done but our network guys have spent hours making sure it’s fairly hack-proof. Fighting hackers is always a losing battle – every game suffers from that – but we’re doing our best to thwart them.
Kevin Sheller: And then there will be downloadable patches, which we couldn’t do in the first game. Now we can see what people are doing, make modifications and if you want to play online you’ll have to download the patch.
