SEGA has a long history of supporting its retro titles, with many ported directly to Android and iOS as part of the SEGA Forever program. However, the company will soon pull support for nearly its entire remaining catalog of mobile ports, including classic Sonic, Crazy Taxi, and Shining Force games.
There’s no telling how long they will remain on the Google Play Store, but the good news is that they’ve all been made free. Previously, most were paid titles costing roughly $2, or were playable for free with IAP to remove ads.
The announcement came not via any official channels, but rather via an in-game popup in the affected titles. It reads: “Support for this game will be discontinued, but you can continue playing offline! If you’d like to learn more about great SEGA games to play, please click the link below.” The link leads to the SEGA homepage.
This message implies that the game will still be playable after it’s removed from the Play Store, provided you have claimed it on your account. This was the case for previous SEGA Forever titles that were pulled a few years ago, which included games like Phantasy Star Classics and Vectorman Classic.
Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before the rest of these games lost support. The SEGA Forever program was discontinued in late 2023, and the last port was added to Android way back in 2019. While the ports didn’t always live up to emulation, they did have full controller support, with many getting tens of millions of downloads.
Here is the full list of games losing support :
Crazy Taxi Classic
Golden Axe Classics (Golden Axe I, II, and III)
Shining Force Classics (Shining Force I, II, and Shining in the Darkness)
Sonic CD Classic
Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Ep. II
Streets of Rage Classic
Streets of Rage 2 Classic
Super Monkey Ball: Sakura Ed.
Virtua Tennis Challenge
Please visit the article website for Play Store/App Store links
17 Comments
**TL;DR**
>Nine retro SEGA games ported to mobile are now free without ads, but will lose support soon.
>You can still download them, and they will likely remain in your account forever.
>Free games include Crazy Taxi Classic, Shining Force Classics, Streets of Rage 2 Classic, and more.
Note : The article headline only mentions Android (probably because it’s from Android Authority), but it would appear that these games are available for free on both Android and iOS, so I’ve changed the headline of the post to reflect that.
Edit : Please visit the article for app store links.
That title is very click baity
A lot easier to just use the emulator
Time to relive the 90s on a 2020 device
Thank you
If you’ve got an iPhone this is probably the best *and* easiest way to play Crazy Taxi on it. Is it a good version? Fuck knows, but it’s free so I might as well give it a go.
I don’t understand why Sega keeps pulling things. The rumor before the delistings was that they were going to launch their own service… but they didn’t?
SEGA does what Nintendon’t: Full fledged classics for free!
Thanks for the heads up, grabbing some of them to enjoy later
Because you can play literally any retro games from any publisher
I don’t game on my phone very much at all but i grew up playing a lot of these games in the arcades or on the console. Will absolutely be giving most of them a play. Thanks
Thanks! Super Monkey Ball is actually a really good version and Sonic CD is aces
End support mean it wouldn’t be playable on newer version of android/iOS, there’s been a ton of game like that just to name a few like Resident Evil 4 mobile, Dead space mobile etc.
Thank you for this!
I feel like there is a catch
Crazy Taxi has the original music
Shining Force 1&2 are both amazing games. highlyy recommend