SEGA Forever Lets You Play Retro Games on Smartphones

Like Nintendo, SEGA seems astutely aware of the power behind classic games. The company is tapping into gamers’ collective nostalgia by bringing titles like Sonic The Hedgehog, Kid Chameleon, Phantasy Star II and Altered Beast straight to smartphones. The good news? All of these games are free to play. They come with a save feature, support wireless Bluetooth controllers, and it goes without saying there’s an online leaderboard that lets you pit your high scores against players around the world. The bad news—there are ads.

It’s almost inevitable for F2P games to follow this route. In fact, SEGA’s own Crazy Taxi (which launched for mobile last month) released for free but allowed players to upgrade to an ad-free version for a cost. The same strategy is being applied to SEGA Forever, which is described as a “free and growing classic games collection of nearly every SEGA game ever released from every console era”.

Interested players can download the games right here. We’ll keep updating the list as it grows:

• Sonic The Hedgehog — iOS, Android
• Altered Beast — iOS, Android
• Phantasy Star II — iOS, Android
• Kid Chameleon — iOS, Android
• Comix Zone — iOS, Android

Virtua Tennis is the next game scheduled to come out for mobile. All the games will be accompanied by iMessage sticker packs that support iOS 10 and up.