Sonic began as a rabbit, took his shoes from Michael Jackson
Sega needed a star to fight Mario, and its first idea was a rabbit that grabbed things with its ears. The hardware could not cope, so the team chose a hedgehog that rolls into a ball, painted him Sega-logo blue and gave him red-and-white shoes inspired by the cover of Bad.
Around 1990 Sega's 16-bit Genesis was losing to Nintendo, which barely treated Sega as a rival. Company president Hayao Nakayama concluded that porting arcade hits was not enough; Sega needed a flagship character whose game could show off the console. An internal contest aimed at American players followed. Programmer Yuji Naka brought a tech demo with an algorithm that let a sprite glide smoothly along curves, shown as a character rolling through a long winding tube.
Artist Naoto Ohshima supplied the teal hedgehog and designer Hirokazu Yasuhara built the levels. Sonic's attitude was modelled on the can-do manner of Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas. Ohshima's rejected contest entry was recycled as the villain, Doctor Eggman. Oddly, Sonic's public debut was as a trinket dangling from a rearview mirror in the racing game Rad Mobile, five months before his own game.
American staff were unconvinced. Sega of America's former chief Michael Katz was sure children would not care, yet his successor Tom Kalinske bundled the 1991 game with the Genesis. It was acclaimed and is credited with helping Sega reach 65 percent of the market against Nintendo. Naka, feeling uncredited, left and joined the US-based Sega Technical Institute, where Sonic 2 introduced Tails, a two-tailed flying fox drawn from the kitsune of Japanese myth. Sonic 3 was later split in half because of cartridge limits and a McDonald's tie-in; a clever adapter let the two cartridges join.
The move to 3D stumbled. Sonic X-treme, planned for the Saturn in 1996, collapsed amid feuding between Sega's American and Japanese offices and the illness of two lead developers, and the Saturn's shortage of Sonic games is counted among the reasons it failed. The franchise recovered, and by 2024 combined sales and free mobile downloads totalled 1.77 billion.
Source: Sonic the Hedgehog
