The music used 8-bit stereo sound, and was very rich and detailed.
The game has been praised for its dynamic music, composed by Masato Nakamura, a member of the popular J-Pop band, Dreams Come True. It is a picturesque paradise with green forests, beautiful blue lakes, and brown checkered soil. Green Hill Zone is the first zone in Sonic the Hedgehog. This success eventually led to Sega overtaking Nintendo with control of 55% of the 16-bit console market, making it the first time Nintendo was not the console leader since 1985. It was the first game to really propel the Genesis into mass popularity in North America, to the point that the Sega console outsold the Super Nintendo nearly 2 to 1 during the 1991 holiday season. Sonic the Hedgehog was the video game that started off the career of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Team.
In the Japanese manual, the katakana for this Zone directly reads "Green Hill", suggesting that Green Hills may possibly be a typographical error on the part of the developers.From the historic video game “Sonic the Hedgehog”. This stage is artificially made more difficult on the Game Gear port due to the system's limited display size, resulting in "blind jumps" that the Master System port does not have. This anomaly also exists in Sonic Chaos, where Mecha Green Hill Zone is also the fourth Zone of the game. Green Hills Zone's position as the fourth Zone is somewhat surprising, because the easy platforming (as well as its several opportunities for maxing out Rings and collecting extra lives) would make one expect that (as usual with Green Hill-themed Zones) this Zone would come first in the game. Also, a remix of part of the melody can be heard in the Invincibility theme in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2. A faster variation plays during the Invincible power-up in Sonic Drift. The Zone's music was remixed into " Sonic - You Can Do Anything", the Japanese/Europe intro theme of Sonic the Hedgehog CD, and was also the music for Mecha Green Hill Zone in Sonic Chaos. The name is a reference to Green Hill Zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, which it also heavily resembles. When he unfurls, that's the player's chance to hit him. Sonic's porcine adversary will curl up into a ball and either roll or float from one side of the screen to the other. The boss is a robotic pig with an inexplicable penchant for sumo posturing.