I couldn't find a press release so I Googled sonic turns 25 and found this old Vice article.
Quote:
2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive. The 16bit-era sequels that followed are remembered fondly, but can be unfairly regarded as all style and no substance. The commonly held view is that they were all hold-right-to-win affairs, where entire levels were treated as giant time-attack modes with little depth behind the bright colors and flashing lights. But that's so far from the complete picture.
Certainly, the games were a lot faster and more frantic than many of the other platformers available at the time. (The first person to mention Zool gets a lollipop.) Compared to Sonic, Mario's adventures through the Mushroom Kingdom were positively sedate affairs, and going from Nintendo's mascot to Sega's new, blue figurehead for the first time felt like embarking on a narrow boat vacation only to find that a wizard had turned your barge into a jet ski. Sonic flung himself around the courses, to the point that the screen could barely keep up once you had unlocked Super Sonic, introduced in Sonic 2. Shooting smoothly through shuttle loops and curving pathways was, thanks to the relative power of the Mega Drive and some very clever programming, utterly unlike anything that gamers had seen before.
Yet Sonic, almost from the very beginning, wasn't exclusively about speed. Granted, some levels were light—the first in the original Sonic can be beaten in under 30 seconds, and the opening stage of Sonic 2 can be just about be completed in less than a minute while blindfolded and using your feetą. But as you go deeper into the Mega Drive-period games, they reveal some deviously tricky platforming that remains challenging to this day, with multiple routes through zones and jumps that require Jedi-like reflexes to get right the first time.
