Weird SEGA facts

August 15, 2025

I fell down a weird Wikipedia rabbit hole this morning. It was kicked off by a Bluesky post from Jeff Gerstmann, and it taught me two weird things about Sonic the Hedgehog.

Gerstmann’s post shows off MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head for the Game Gear. I’d never seen it before and doesn’t look like any fun at all, really. That said, I was surprised by the colour depth. I knew the Game Gear was based on the Master System, but while both consoles could display 32 colours on screen at once, it turns out that the Game Gear had a total addressable palette of 4,096 colours over the Master System’s 64.

I also knew that SEGA’s System 1 and System 2 arcade boards shared some technical similarities with the Master System, along with several games. I was reminded of this most recently in a video by Jeremy Parish that recounts the history of SEGA’s pre-Genesis arcade efforts. I looked into the System 1 and 2 boards a bit, but the Wikipedia page outlining all of SEGA’s arcade hardware was slightly more interesting to me.

While reading through this, I dug into several of the linked games for each generation of hardware. The System 32 board had two games that surprised me. First was Rad Mobile, which turns out to be the first appearance of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic appears in Rad Mobile as a small toy dangling from the rear-view mirror, and the game launched more than half a year before the first proper Sonic game on the Genesis.

The second was something I’d seen mentioned before, but didn’t know much about: SegaSonic the Hedgehog. I had assumed this game launched before Sonic had blown up in mainstream culture, hence the weird “SegaSonic” name. Nope! This was released a couple of years after the first Genesis title. Instead, it was apparently a trademark blunder caused by SEGA’s American arm that necessitated the odd name. Oops.

I grew up as a Nintendo kid, so maybe these points aren’t as interesting to others. Still, I thought I’d share. If you’re interested in more SEGA facts, you might want to check out videogamedunkey’s deep and insightful dive into Sonic R. Let’s just say that the soundtrack to that game is a main topic of investigation.