Sonic or Sonic may refer to:
Sonic the Hedgehog (ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ, Sonikku za Hejjihoggu) is a video game franchise created and owned by Sega. The franchise centers on a series of speed-based platform games, but several are spin-offs in different genres. The protagonist of the series is an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog named Sonic, whose peaceful life is often interrupted by the series's main antagonist, Doctor Eggman. Typically, Sonic—usually along with some of his friends, such as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles—must stop Eggman and foil any plans of world domination. The first game in the series, published in 1991, was conceived by Sega's Sonic Team division after Sega requested a mascot character; the title was a success and spawned sequels, and transformed Sega into a leading video game company during the 16-bit era in the early to mid-1990s.
Sonic Team has since developed many titles in the franchise. Prominent members of its initial staff included Naka, character designer Naoto Ohshima, and level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara. Other developers of Sonic games have included Japanese Dimps, American Sega Technical Institute, Backbone Entertainment, Big Red Button Entertainment, and Sanzaru Games, Canadian BioWare, and British Sumo Digital and Traveller's Tales. While the first games in the series were side-scrolling platform games, the series has expanded into other genres such as action-adventure, fighting, racing, role-playing, and sports. Including packaged game software and downloads, the franchise has sold 335 million units as of April 2015, with the mobile game Sonic Dash being downloaded over 100 million times by June 2015, making it one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Japanese: ソニック・ザ・ヘッジホッグ, Hepburn: Sonikku za Hejjihoggu), trademarked Sonic The Hedgehog, is the title character and protagonist of the Sonic the Hedgehog series released by Sega, as well as numerous spin-off comics, five animated shows, and an animated OVA.
Sonic is a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog who has the ability to run at supersonic speeds and the ability to curl into a ball, primarily to attack enemies. Throughout the course of the video games, Sonic most commonly has to race through levels, collect power up rings and survive against a host of natural obstacles and minions to achieve his goal. While many individuals at Sega had a hand in Sonic's creation, programmer Yuji Naka and artist Naoto Ohshima are generally credited with the creation of the character.
The first game was released on June 23, 1991, to provide Sega with a mascot to rival Nintendo's flagship character Mario (see 1991 in video gaming). Since then, Sonic has become one of the world's best-known video game characters, with his series selling more than 80 million copies. In 2005, Sonic was one of the first game character inductees into the Walk of Game, alongside Mario and Link.
Parsec is a library for writing parsers in Haskell. It is based on higher-order parser combinators, so a complicated parser can be made out of many smaller ones. It has been reimplemented in many other languages, including Erlang, OCaml, F# and C#, as well as imperative languages such as Java.
Because a parser combinator-based program is generally slower than a parser generator-based program, Parsec is normally used for small domain-specific languages, while Happy is used for compilers such as GHC.
ABA Games is a Japanese video game developer, composed solely of game designer Kenta Cho. ABA Games' works, available as open source freeware, are predominantly shoot 'em up games often inspired by classic games in the genre. Its games feature stylised retro graphics, innovative gameplay features and modes and are set in random rather than scripted events. These creations have been acclaimed as some of the best and well-known independent games available, though some commentators, including Cho himself, feel they are too simple for commercial release.
Cho began creating computer games as a hobby during his childhood in the 1980s. After leaving university, he pursued a career with Toshiba in multimedia research and development while continuing to develop games in his spare time. The positive reaction to ABA Games' first shoot 'em up, Noiz2sa (2002), encouraged him to concentrate on that genre. The developer's games have been ported from the original Windows versions to Mac OS X and Linux, and various handheld devices. One of its games, Tumiki Fighters, was remade, built upon and released for the Wii console as Blast Works. According to Cho, he occasionally receives interest in further console ports. In addition to Tumiki Fighters, acclaimed ABA Games titles include Gunroar, rRootage and Torus Trooper.