SEGA has announced that its new collection, SEGA Forever, will feature the quintessential classic games we love in new formats intended for mobile devices. The collection will be free for all users; to generate revenue, SEGA Forever will contain ads, but you can do away with those by making a single $1.99 payment. You’ll even be able to save your progress to the Cloud.
When it launches, the collection will offer 5 classic games: Sonic the Hedgehog, Kid Chameleon, Phantasy Star II, Comix Zone and Altered Beast. You’ll be able to get them from the Google Play Store and the App Store for any of your iOS mobile devices. But those five titles are only the beginning. SEGA is planning to add new (old) games to the collection every two weeks, which means that our need for the nostalgia of SEGA games should be well tended to. What is more, SEGA said that the games it plans on releasing will span across multiple generations of gaming consoles over time, which means more great titles to add to the SEGA Forever collection. The games can be played online or off, and online players will be featured in online leaderboards.
Classic games have been making a comeback as of late, and the wild success of Nintendo’s NES Classic edition introduced last year may have inspired other older gaming giants to make a comeback. SEGA’s news of its SEGA Forever collection comes only a few days after Atari CEO Fred Chesnais confirmed that the company is working on its latest console, the Ataribox, 24 years after their last gaming console, the Atari Jaguar, was launched. Going mobile is a great move on SEGA’s part, because it will allow gamers to enjoy the classic games they like without having to spend money on vintage consoles and cartridges. The ads are a smart move, too, and the two bucks ad-free purchase option is more than affordable for those users who really can’t stand 15 seconds of product placing.
SEGA plans to launch its collection tomorrow, June 22nd, so if all goes well we won’t have to wait too long to see if the classics translate well to mobile devices. We’re looking forward to trying it out and finding that childhood bliss while a blue hedgehog rolls down a coin-littered hill.