What many younger gamers don't realize is that the Sonic games as originally release were very slow, casually-paced games, one of the original "walking simulators".
It's only because of the naive dependency of those early game developers on CPU-cycle based timing loops -- under the assumption that CPU speed could be treated as a fixed constant -- that the games now run far too quickly under modern emulation conditions.
"Gotta Go Fast" was originally a kind of zen koan, not Sonic's aspiration.
@spowers Sonic was originally a sex game, they managed to change most of the text but the marketing team missed a couple bits