With Sega’s still-fledgling Mega Drive failing to set the world on fire, Sonic (a hedgehog) made his console debut in the wittily-titled Sonic The Hedgehog. Gamers were immediately blown away by the lush graphics and, more importantly, the dazzling speed of the acrobatic platform action. Everywhere the game was loaded up, crowds would gather to coo as Sonic rocketed round loop-the-loops and was ricocheted around by giant springs, and a star was born. Later in the year, the little blue guy also debuted on the Game Gear in a well-received game of the same name, losing surprisingly little of its flash and waft in the translation.

1992

In what’s still one of the biggest videogame launches of all time, "Sonic Twosday" saw the simultaneous release of Sonic 2 on Mega Drive and Game Gear. While bearing the same name, the games were very different (as with the respective originals), but both were bigger and better than their predecessors, and the carts flew off shop shelves as fast as the little 8-year-old orphans working 22-hour shifts in Sega’s Far Eastern sweatshops could churn them out. Sonic 2 also saw the introduction of Sonic’s appallingly-named sidekick Miles "Tails" Prower, who sensibly stuck to his middle monicker only from then on.

1993

The way Sonic was already being catapulted, hurled and bounced around in his games, it made perfect sense to go the whole way and turn him into an actual pinball, and so the ace Sonic Spinball was born on Mega Drive providing a curious twist on normal pinball games in that you could actually control the movement of the "ball" as well as flip it around. Also in 1993, the Game Gear (which got its own Sonic Spinball port the next year) broke away on its own with a new, more traditional Sonic game called Sonic Chaos, and the new Mega CD add-on got its own Sonic game (cleverly entitled Sonic CD to avoid confusing Americans), a huge, sprawling, 60-level effort with an extraordinarily bizarre time-travelling plotline, which baffled many of Sonic’s younger fans but was adored by the ‘core. (Hard, that is.) Meanwhile, arcade-goers had their first taste of the hog in the rarely-seen Sonic The Hedgehog Arcade, an odd trackball-controlled coin-op that was just too physically exhausting to play to be a success.

1994

More new ground for the wee spiky fella, as the Game Gear saw the release (though only in Japan) of Sonic Drift, a racing game starring the whole Sonic gang. There was also a new Game Gear platformer, Sonic Triple Trouble, which introduced the best-named Sonic character of all time, Nack The Weasel. The Mega Drive wasn’t overlooked, though, with not one but two new Sonic games appearing in the space of the year. First came the misleadingly-named Sonic 3, to be followed by Sonic And Knuckles. Originally intended to be a part of the third game but not completed in time, Sonic And Knuckles was the first ever "add-on" game cartridge – if you plugged Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 into the port built into the S&N cart, it unlocked and revealed whole new levels and areas of the earlier games, a neat idea that’s never been repeated.

1995

A quiet time for Sonic, with only the sequel to Sonic Drift and a new platformer called Sonic Labyrinth – both on Game Gear) showing face. Sonic 4 on the Mega Drive (featuring the player as Sonic AND Tails, joined together with an elastic rope) is cancelled at an early stage in its development as the MD finally fades out of the console picture.

1996

With Sega’s new flagship console the Saturn already having been out for two years, loyal Sonic lovers were mystified at the lack of a game for the machine featuring the beloved mascot. Ater the cancellation of the much-touted Sonic X-Treme, the fans’ favourite finally showed up in Sonic 3D Blast, an ill-fated attempt to bring the third dimension to Sonic’s world at the cost of the high-speed thrills of the previous games. Matters weren’t helped that that game looked almost the same on the Saturn as on the Mega Drive and it wasn’t a hit (there was also a Sonic Blast released on the Sega Master System this year, although it was a standard 2D platformer which abandoned the clean, sharp graphics of the previous games for a strange pseudo-3D look reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country on the SNES), all of which cast doubts over Sonic’s whole future - was he Yesterday’s Hedgehog? An arcade beat-‘em-up called Sonic The Fighters might have helped his profile, but Sega neglected to promote the game outside of Japan and it didn’t last. (Incidentally, this year also saw Sonic’s weirdest appearance, in an educational PC title called Sonic’s Schoolhouse, in which the cash-strapped hog paid the rent by helping kids learn to read and write.)

1997

A flurry of Saturn activity this year. First there was Sonic Jam, a collection of the first four Sonic games linked together by a little Mario 64-esque 3D world and supported by all sorts of Sonic trivia and "memorabilia", and then came Sonic R, a genuinely innovative and strange racing game set in a fully 3D environment which would go on to prove a major source of inspiration for Sonic Adventure on the soon-to-arrive Dreamcast.

1998

Sonic Goes On Holiday.

1999

Having learned the lessons of the Saturn, Sega give their shiny new Dreamcast console a Sonic game almost from the off, in the shape of Sonic Adventure. More of a showcase for the new machine’s awesome power than a game, the title draws gasping crowds to the machine in exactly the same way as the original Sonic did eight years before.

2000