Before Sonic was a franchise, before he was a household name, before he even had a single game, he was just an idea and a pitch. It’s quite common knowledge that Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima along with a few others had to pitch the idea of Sonic to Sega higher ups in order to get the green light for development.

Part of this pitch included ‘a small Sonic plush toy’, this has been a matter of record in a number of different interviews and articles, such as the History of Sonic book which came out a few years ago.

Yet, to this day, nobody has ever seen this plush… well… that might have changed.

Naoto Ohshima, the man who designed Sonic has lately been posting a lot of very interesting pieces of artwork and design on his Facebook page, including a rather curious plush.

Whilst he’s not confirmed it is the original plush from the pitch, there’s a number of clues to suggest it might be, first of all, there are no tags of any kind, it’s a homemade item, secondly, it stands upright on it’s own accord, there are only a handful of Sonic plushies out there which do this and none of them look anything like this.

Another big clue is that it is VERY high quality, this was not made for mass market, it was either made to order or was an extremely limited run.

Speaking to a few Sonic Merch collectors, none of them have been able to identify it which would either put this as a custom job… or… the legendary plush. If it is the plush from the pitch, it would make this product 001, the very first piece of Sonic merch ever to have existed and a one of a kind.

The watch on his wrist is a different product which was released a few years after Sonic 1. If we get anymore details as to the origins of this mystery product, we’ll let you know.

Source: Naoto Ohshima Facebook.