Sonic Mega Collaboration Plus

**Sonic Mega Collection Plus** (Sega, PlayStation 2, 2005)

These days, it’s pretty common for bestselling games to in fact be collections of old games. Generally those games are given a bit of a refreshment and, if we’re lucky, an improvement, but the appeal to nostalgia and convenience remains central. 2005 was well before those days had set in so strongly. It would be almost a full decade after Sonic Mega Collection Plus before another retro collection would reach #1 in the UK charts. Yet it did so.

There was a unique alignment between the level of nostalgia for Sonic and Sega being in position to want to sell such a collection (eventually) for the PS2. Before the PlayStation, the story of video games in the UK was largely not one of consoles, but Sonic was the biggest exception to that. He often felt somehow like ours. Really, Sega missed a trick in having the collection’s galleries include Sonic comics but nothing from the UK’s own Sonic the Comic, passing up a chance for a more specific nostalgia. It’s alright, though. Sonic’s appeal was so much wider than that.

That’s why for the story that Sonic Mega Collection Plus tells with its 20 Mega Drive and Game Gear games, I’m not going to try to tell it alone. Instead, in this 30th anniversary year of Sonic, please enjoy the most ambitious retrospective I’ve co-ordinated yet. 20 games, 15 writers, more than 12,000 words, and a whole load of ’90s Sonic. Pick your starting point in Sonic Mega Collaboration Plus below: