The Green Hill Zone stands resplendent across its various reincarnations, an Eden from which Sonic is always rapidly departing, but the landscape is otherwise that of D-Day, strewn with dropped rings and the bodies of interchangeable sidekicks or rivals. The entirety of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, a game that wants to be Final Fantasy so much it has Sonic snog a princess, as if in hopes of a magical transformation. Charlie Sheen-grade sitcom sketches in the recent Sonic Boom, an attempt to do for Sonic what the Teen Titans did for DC Comics. What terrible scenes those eyes have beheld! Popping your hips at Kinect in Sonic Free Riders, for instance. Sonic still has green eyes in Sonic Team's forthcoming Sonic Forces, decades later, but we're a long way from those green pastures. 'I thought it would be nice to reflect that in his eyes.' 'He is always seeing these green pastures around him, like in Green Hill Zone,' Uekawa explains in an interview conducted for Sega's 25th anniversary artbook. Some of his decisions were practical: shrinking Sonic's enormous, swept-back skull and elongating his limbs, for instance, so that he doesn't look like a fuzzy joystick when viewed from the rear. Ristar creator Yuji Uekawa was the man tasked with revamping Sega's mascot for his debut on Dreamcast.

Why are Sonic's eyes green in Sonic Adventure, the franchise's first serious crack at a fully 3D polygonal platformer? It turns out there's a lovely little story behind that.

Sonic 3d green zone fan game