Sonic Is Only Half the Story: The SEGA Games XBOX Players Want to See Made Backward Compatible
Of the 63,588 votes across every SEGA game on the site, 36,097 are for a Sonic title. One franchise carries the single largest share of SEGA's demand, and the rest is spread across dozens of others.
A measurement, not a petition.
XBOXGamePreservation.com asks players a single question: which Original XBOX and XBOX 360 games do you want to be able to play again via backward compatibility on modern XBOX consoles? This page looks at every SEGA game released on Original XBOX and XBOX 360.
What is XBOX backward compatibility?
It's the program in which Original XBOX and XBOX 360 titles are given the green light by publishers and rights holders to let XBOX make them playable, and often buyable, again on current XBOX consoles. For rights holders, the key requirement is approval. XBOX handles the technical work required to bring supported titles to modern consoles.
The SEGA catalog, by ownership.
Here is how the votes distribute, ranked by demand. Sonic is the single largest block by a wide margin, but the rest of SEGA's owned catalog, Jet Set Radio plus dozens of other properties, carries nearly as much demand between it.
Top 10 SEGA titles by votes
Jet Set Radio Future is the biggest game here that isn't Sonic.
Below Sonic sits a broad second tier: more than 20,000 votes across roughly sixty SEGA-owned games. The standout is Jet Set Radio Future. At 7,515 votes it is the most-requested non-Sonic SEGA title on the site.
Jet Set Radio Future never left the original XBOX, no PC port, no re-release, no version on any modern console.
votes for SEGA-owned games that aren't Sonic or licensed properties, across roughly sixty titles. Jet Set Radio Future, OutRun, Shenmue, Alpha Protocol, Phantasy Star, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage all sit in this tier.
Alpha Protocol is the most-requested standalone game in the entire database.
Almost every heavily-requested game on the site belongs to a franchise: Sonic, Transformers, Spider-Man, Need for Speed. Alpha Protocol does not. SEGA's 2010 espionage role-playing game, developed by Obsidian, has no sequel and no series behind it, and with 1,362 votes it is the highest-voted game in the whole database that stands entirely on its own.
The people who want Sonic and the people who want everything else are mostly different groups.
Sonic drew 13,834 voters; the non-Sonic SEGA catalog drew 11,938, a group of nearly the same size. The two overlap by about a third: 4,382 people voted for both. That leaves the majority of each group exclusive to it, roughly two-thirds of Sonic voters never touched another SEGA game, and nearly two-thirds of non-Sonic SEGA voters never voted for Sonic.
voters chose SEGA's non-Sonic catalog and no Sonic game at all, an audience almost as large as Sonic's own exclusive base.
of Jet Set Radio Future's voters never voted for a single Sonic game. Its following is its own.
That gap matters for reading the signal. Sonic is the largest single SEGA franchise, but acting on it alone would leave most of SEGA's non-Sonic voters unserved, a nearly equal-sized audience asking for different games.
Some of these games are built on licensed music.
A handful of SEGA's most-wanted titles carry an added complication that has nothing to do with who owns the game. Jet Set Radio Future, Crazy Taxi 3, Alpha Protocol and more were built around licensed soundtracks. When those licenses lapse, the game often has to be pulled from sale, which is likely part of why several of them are unavailable today.
For specific titles, backward compatibility may involve renewing music rights on top of the usual approval. It doesn't diminish the demand; it simply explains why some of the most-loved SEGA games are also delisted and unavailable today.
Some of these games have never been on PC at all.
In July 2026, XBOX backward compatibility expanded to PC. This could mean that a large share of SEGA's Original XBOX titles would be eligible for a first-ever official PC release. Jet Set Radio Future is the clearest case, one of the most-requested games on the whole site, it has never left the XBOX ecosystem in more than twenty years, with no PC port and no version on modern consoles.
Sixteen of the Original XBOX SEGA games on this page were console-only in their day and never came to PC, from Shadow the Hedgehog and OutRun 2 to Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II, Shenmue II, Spartan: Total Warrior, Shin Megami Tensei: Nine and Spikeout: Battle Street. For these, approval wouldn't just restore them on console, it could also put these versions on PC for the first time, with no development work required from SEGA.
PC support is optional. A publisher can approve a title for console backward compatibility alone, or for console and PC together. As of now, only Original XBOX games have been announced for PC backward compatibility, so the "PC debut" note in this analysis is applied only to Original XBOX titles that never had a PC release. The XBOX 360 catalog may follow, but has not yet been announced for PC.
Most of this demand points back to SEGA itself.
What sets SEGA apart in this dataset is not just the size of the demand, it is who holds the keys. Of the 63,588 votes across every SEGA game on the site, 56,807, nearly nine in ten, are for titles SEGA owns outright.
The demand is also broader than the headline. Sonic is the single largest franchise by a wide margin, but the interest doesn't begin and end with it. Set Sonic aside entirely and 20,710 votes remain, spread across roughly sixty games and drawing an audience of 11,938 voters, most of whom never voted for a Sonic game at all. Jet Set Radio Future, Shenmue, OutRun, Alpha Protocol and the Atlus catalog each carry their own following.
of all SEGA demand is for games SEGA owns outright, 56,807 votes.
of everyone who has voted on the site, 23,615 people, voted for at least one SEGA title.
Method & caveats.
Live site data: 880,023 votes from 91,955 voters across 2,860 games, and growing. Percentages are calculated against the current voter total. Vote counts are frozen at the most recent data refresh and are never summed across platforms.
Titles are attributed to SEGA to the best of my knowledge from public information. SEGA-owned properties, Sonic, Jet Set Radio, OutRun, Shenmue, Alpha Protocol, the Atlus and Phantasy Star catalogs, carry the demand figures. A separate group, marked with a double asterisk (**), covers games SEGA published but does not own outright: the Marvel titles (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor), the Aliens games (owned by Disney's 20th Century), the Warhammer titles (Games Workshop), and Fist of the North Star (a licensed manga). The Football Manager games are also grouped here: SEGA owns them, but they run on licensed real-world football data and player likenesses that carry separate rights. Bringing the licensed group back may require agreement from additional rights holders, and several also appear on the Disney demand page for that reason. SEGA's former sports catalog (the NBA 2K, NHL 2K and related series) is excluded entirely: SEGA sold that intellectual property to Take-Two Interactive in 2005.
A game is called standalone when it has no sequel and no wider series anywhere. Alpha Protocol is the highest-voted standalone game in the full database; every game ranked above it belongs to a franchise.
Games already on backward compatibility and delisted games are excluded from the demand totals; delisted titles are listed separately in the final section. Titles that used the Kinect sensor are labeled as such in the full list below, since that hardware is no longer produced. The "PC debut" marker is applied only to Original XBOX titles I can confirm were never released on PC, since only Original XBOX games have so far been announced for PC backward compatibility.
This site and analysis are independent, unaffiliated with Microsoft or SEGA, and carry no paid promotion. It is one signal of player interest, offered as input, not a demand or a commitment sought on any specific title.
Every title, by name.
All 96 SEGA games behind the demand figures, grouped by ownership, plus the delisted cohort and the separate PC backward compatibility requests, with platform and vote count. Titles released on both generations are listed once per platform.
Correction: Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction was previously included here as a SEGA title. It was published by Electronic Arts, not SEGA, so it has been removed from this analysis along with its 1,050 votes.
* Titles are attributed to SEGA to the best of my knowledge from public information. Some games were co-published or carry licensing arrangements that may involve additional rights holders.
** Published under license. SEGA released these titles but does not own the underlying property, so a return may require agreement from additional rights holders.