Sonic Mega Collection Plus

Mega Collection was developed by Sonic Team, the studio behind most games in the Sonic series. According to director Yojiro Ogawa, Sonic Team's goal with the compilation was to introduce children to older games in the series and showcase what made Sonic successful. Sonic Team chose to focus on including all the Genesis Sonic games. Rather than porting them from the Genesis, they collaborated with VR-1 Japan to develop an emulator to run the games' ROM images.

Series co-creator Yuji Naka, who served as producer, said the team intended to include the 1993 Sega CD game Sonic CD, but storage constraints prevented this. Sonic Team also considered including BlueSky Software's Vectorman (1995). CD and Vectorman later appeared in Sonic Gems Collection (2005), a successor to Mega Collection focusing on rare Sonic games. Sonic Team had trouble gathering materials for the compilation because it had been a decade since they made the games and "Sega's not that good about keeping history."

Reviews for Sonic Mega Collection were "generally favorable" according to Metacritic. Chet Barber of Game Informer and Fran Mirabella III of IGN regarded it as one of the best compilations of its time. Critics considered it a great value for Sonic fans and newcomers, especially those without access to a Genesis, and its low price tag was said to complement its value. However, Michael Cole of Nintendo World Report and Johnny Liu of GameRevolution deemed it less essential to those who already own the originals or Sonic Jam. Sonic Mega Collection was a runner-up for GameSpot's annual "Best Platformer on GameCube" award, which went to Super Mario Sunshine.

Critics lauded the faithful emulation quality of the Genesis games, which provided an authentic experience. They emphasized that the controls adapted well to the GameCube controller. Although Mugwum of Eurogamer faulted the preservation of the games' flaws, he and Mirabella noted that the split-screen multiplayer mode of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was improved from the original Genesis version to run at a full resolution. The lack of some modern enhancements was lamented.