Fall From Grace
Unfortunately, things started to slowly roll down hill from there. Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles brought very little innovation to the series (Yuji was probably sick and tired of Sega forcing sequels down his throat by then) and Sega slowly lost its lead in the 16-bit market. The opportunity arose to regain that lead as a new generation of hardware was ushered in. Inexplicably, Sega’s offering, the 32-bit Saturn was missing a new Sonic game. Sure the series began to grow moldy on the Genesis, but this new technology made possible exciting new realms of gameplay. A beautifully hand-drawn Sonic with loads of parallax would have been the commercial success that Astal should have been. Instead, Sega farmed their mascot out to European developer Traveler’s Tales. Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R ensued while the Saturn slowly marched towards its grave. I will never understand why Sega treated their mascot as so unimportant. As the new President of Sega of Japan, Shoichiro Irimajiri has admitted, Sega became somewhat arrogant and assumed that their powerful brand name would carry them through (along with mass appeal of Clockwork Knight... end sarcasm). They were wrong. But now, the year is 1998. The system is Dreamcast. The developers are Sonic Team. The Hedgehog is back.