The game was first revealed to the public at Yuusei Sega World event in Tokyo on December 6, 1992 under the title CD Sonic the Hedgehog.[1][2][3] This early title continued being shown in pre-release prototypes up until the beta build dated May 12, 1993.
With the game first released in Japan on September 23, 1993,[4] the Japanese logo of Sonic the Hedgehog CD utilizes mixture of gold color combined with textured material around main wordmarks, while retaining pop art style for the rest of the logo.[5] This logo is also used for 1996 CD-ROM release in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as well for the Mega Drive Mini 2 release.
Released in United States on November 23, 1993, North American logo implemented flat "SONIC" wordmark also seen in logos of Sonic Spinball and Sonic Chaos as all three games were released during the "Sonic 3-in-1 Day" campaign.[6] The logo was later used in early 1995 "Pentium Processor Edition" release for Intel Pentium-based computers in United States, United Kingdom and Brazil.
The renewed logo was introduced in Japanese Sonic Tweet web application and later used for the 2011 re-release of the game developed by Christian Whitehead. While the final logo was based on the North American logo from Sega CD release, European/Australian logo from the 1996 CD-ROM release was initially recycled around the time Christian was showcasing the proof of concept iPhone demo for TouchArcade.[8][9]
The final logo was also used in mobile phone revisions and later releases such as Windows Phone, Ouya and Apple TV. Prior the release of Sonic Origins, Sega delisted the 2011 re-release from all platforms with the exception of mobile devices on May 20, 2022.[10] On June 30, 2025 though, the mobile version was also delisted from both the App Store and Google Play Store.[11]
↑Sonic CD Dev Diary (video). Sega Europe. YouTube (November 29, 2011). Retrieved on February 20, 2025. “Kazuyuki Hoshino: Since this title was going to be for the newly introduced Mega-CD hardware, we wanted to give it a different touch. So with the logo, you'll see that we used a gold color combined with textured material, but at the same time we retain the pop feeling and style.”
