Today we are very pleased to announce the winners of Sonic's Birthday Contest! The contest challenged the community in coming up with a video that showed the passion and excitement of being a Sonic fan and we were completely blown away by the 300+ videos submitted by everyone! Having enjoyed watching each and every one we finally picked our top 10 videos. And today, at long last, we are very proud to announce the winners of our first, second and third place prizes...

But before we announce these, and to keep you in suspense, we would like to address the concerns with the user participation portion of the contest. As you know we discovered voting irregularities on July 16th and ceased user participation a few days later. It was our original goal to create an opportunity for a winner to be picked by the community but due to these voting irregularities we have had to come up with a different solution. It's important to all of us at SEGA that this process is made as transparent as possible because we respect and admire all the hardworking fans that created videos in the Birthday Contest.

In looking at the voting data we learned we could not discern the difference between legit and non-legit votes with any accuracy we were comfortable with. We felt it would be unfair to scrub the votes down to the first day or two of voting and award based on that. We also briefly discussed creating a new voting system – but the delay in crafting this new tool would take some time and be extremely limiting; quite the opposite of what we wanted initially.

The goal of this promotion was to do something big, something new and something that would reward the ceaseless efforts of the Sonic community that we are so regularly impressed with. Therefore we decided the fairest option would be for the Sonic Team themselves, along with a team of SEGA employees from our Japanese, American and European offices who worked on the Sonic Birthday Contest, to choose the winners.

Each person within this group has voted on their top videos from the 10 that were pre-selected. And so, after much deliberation, we are very proud and hugely excited to announce the US & UK winners: