While many of the most famous games and game franchises of the '80s and '90s have fallen on hard times lately, several of the biggest guns still step up year after year for new games, spin-offs, and revivals: The Super Mario Bros are as strong as ever, Mega Man has a new animated series coming, Pokemon has new games and a live-action movie in the works and even the ninja series Shinobi is looking at a surprising feature film debut.

Also still ambling along after almost 25 years is Sonic The Hedgehog, and now comes word that he'll mark the occasion with a brand new game.

According to Gematsu, the new Sonic game is set to be announced by members of the Sonic Team development group at a 25th Anniversary Party for the speed-running mascot in San Diego on July 22. The imminent announcement was further teased by Sonic and nemesis Doctor Eggman "themselves" on the official Sonic Twitter:

No other details are known about the new game, though the language utilized in the Twitter promotion implied that the announcement had been awaited for some time, possibly indicating that the game will fulfill some long hoped-for desire of the multi-generational Sonic The Hedgehog fanbase. While Sonic has consistently appeared in a long-running series of main-series games, he and his co-stars have also starred in numerous spin-offs and tie-ins encompassing almost every genre in gaming -- as such, the new title could indeed be anything.

While the Sonic character remains popular especially in terms of merchandising, the Sonic games have met with declining sales and reviews over recent years, most recently the poorly received Sonic Boom cartoon tie-in series which angered many fans with controversial redesigns of the main characters. Ironically, the most well-regarded recent Sonic appearances have been guest-starring roles in Nintendo titles like Super Smash Bros and the Mario & Sonic Olympics series.

Despite this, fans remain hopeful for a return to the character's glory days on Sega consoles, and are likely to be hoping to hear such a thing announced at the event. If the reveal is met positively, it could be the beginning of a road back to cultural prominence for the onetime Super Mario Bros rival. Rumors of a proposed Sonic The Hedgehog movie have been gaining steam for some time as well.

Screen Rant will have more details on Sonic the Hedgehog as they are made available.

Source: Gematsu