The easiest way to forget twenty years of videogame history is to remember only the hits.
Visit the GHZ Sonic the Hedgehog Museum
The GHZ Sonic Museum does the opposite. Its giant static index lists Sonic releases by year and by platform, starting in 1991 and running through 2010.
That means the familiar Mega Drive games sit beside things that are much easier to lose track of: Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, Sega Sonic Cosmo Fighter, Pico titles, Game Gear releases, Sonic’s Schoolhouse, N-Gage ports, Game.com versions, arcade games, mobile editions, and the strange side branches that never became franchise-defining landmarks.
A franchise before databases became normal
The page is basically a hand-built relational database expressed as links.
One section sorts by release year. Another reorganizes the same material by hardware: Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear, Mega-CD, Pico, 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo DS, PSP, Wii, PC, mobile, and arcade.
That structure matters because videogame history is messy. One title can exist in several versions, regions, ports, compilations, and platforms. A chronological list answers one question. A hardware list answers another.
The museum also captures the web culture around the franchise. The footer dates the site’s written content and original graphics to 1997–2010 and identifies it plainly as an independent fan site rather than an official Sega property.
That distinction is part of the history. Before publishers built encyclopedic franchise wikis and searchable product databases, fans did the indexing themselves.
The result is useful now because obscure software often survives first as a name. Once somebody finds the exact title and platform, manuals, ROM discussions, screenshots, reviews, and preservation projects become much easier to locate.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many pages like this: static fan indexes that quietly became historical infrastructure.
The GHZ museum stopped around 2010, which makes it incomplete as a modern Sonic database.
It also makes it a surprisingly good snapshot of what the franchise looked like before another fifteen years of releases piled on top.