Retro Renegades Episode: The Only Blue Balls Worth Playing With!

<p>Sonic the Hedgehog[a] is a Japanese video game series and media &nbsp;franchise created and owned by Sega. The franchise follows Sonic, an &nbsp;anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battles the evil Doctor Eggman, a mad &nbsp;scientist. The main Sonic the Hedgehog games are platformers mostly &nbsp;developed by Sonic Team; other games, developed by various studios, &nbsp;include spin-offs in the racing, fighting, party and sports genres. The &nbsp;franchise also incorporates printed media, animations, a 2020 feature &nbsp;film, and merchandise. &nbsp;The first Sonic game, released in 1991 for the Sega Genesis, was &nbsp;developed after Sega requested a mascot character to compete with &nbsp;Nintendo's mascot Mario. Its success helped Sega become one of the &nbsp;leading video game companies during the fourth generation of video game &nbsp;consoles in the early 1990s. Sega Technical Institute developed the next &nbsp;three Sonic games, plus the spin-off Sonic Spinball (1993). After a &nbsp;hiatus during the unsuccessful Saturn era, the first major 3D Sonic &nbsp;game, Sonic Adventure, was released in 1998 for the Dreamcast. Sega &nbsp;exited the console market and shifted to third-party development in &nbsp;2001, continuing the series on Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation systems. &nbsp;Sonic the Hedgehog is Sega's flagship franchise and one of the &nbsp;bestselling video game franchises, selling over 140 million by 2016 and &nbsp;grossing over US$6 billion as of 2020. Series sales and free-to-play &nbsp;mobile game downloads totaled 1.14 billion as of 2020. The Genesis Sonic &nbsp;games have been described as representative of the culture of the 1990s &nbsp;and listed among the greatest of all time. Although later games, &nbsp;notably the 2006 series reboot, have been criticized for a perceived &nbsp;decline in quality, Sonic is influential in the video game industry and &nbsp;is frequently referenced in popular culture. The franchise is also known &nbsp;for its fandom that produces unofficial media, such as fan art