Game end Joy

And so here comes Sonic Generations, a celebration of the past two decades of Sonic madness. The narrative explanation for this turbo-charged sprint down memory lane is that a mysterious new enemy is warping space and time; new Sonic has somehow gone back in time and met 2D Sonic and the two agree to join forces to defeat their new foe - hopefully without creating any apocalyptic space-time paradoxes; or Shadow the Hedgehog 2.

At the heart of this dichotomy, though, is Sonic Adventure, the first title of the modern era, and the one where Sonic Team really started experimenting with the character and his world.

"Sonic's been around for 20 years, he has a large fanbase who have been following him since the beginning," explains Miyamoto. "They're a really core fanbase, so we need to make sure that the new game appeals to them too. We need to make sure that it has depth.