Sonic the Hedgehog’s Gameworld

Sonic the Hedgehog’s Gameworld is an early childhood educational “storyware” cartridge for the Sega Pico system. The cart is one of two Sonic-related games for the system, the other being Tails and the Music Maker. Gameworld was released in August 1994 in Japan and November 1995 in North America.

Children interact with the game by the use of a “magic pen,” the stylus used with the Pico system. After choosing to have either one or two players and an easy or hard difficulty, the game opens up with a simple story—Dr. Robotnik has hidden a Chaos Emerald on each floor of the Gameworld, an amusement park-like tower. Sonic, Tails and Amy must beat all the minigames on each level and find the Emeralds.

To start a game, the child would move the stylus over to an area marking an activity, where an icon would appear showing whether the magic pen, direction pad or red button would be used in the minigame. The scoring of each game is determined by the performance in each task.