On June 23, 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog was "born" onto the Sega Genesis 16-bit console. Since then more than 44 million Sonic games have been sold. To celebrate his 15th birthday, Sega is releasing four different Sonic titles. Sonic the Hedgehog will make its way to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this fall. Sonic Rivals will come out for the PSP this fall as well. Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis will be a port of the very first Sonic game and will come out for the Game Boy Advance later this year. Finally, a new, as yet untitled Sonic title will come out in 2007 for the Nintendo Wii.
Sega released a few Sonic factoids as well. According to them, more than 8,000 Sonic games are sold everyday all over the world, and if you tallied up the amount of time gamers all over the world have spent playing Sonic games, the total would top 500 million hours. If that's how long people have played Sonic titles, we don't even want to try to figure out how much time humankind has spent playing World of Warcraft.