Sonic Team Creative Director Kazuyuki Hoshino might be most famous for guiding the Blue Blur's trajectory today, but he's been with Sega since 1991, and one of his first projects was working on the Mega CD / Sega CD add-on for the Mega Drive / Genesis.

A unique piece of history from Hoshino's early years at the company has been found and preserved, and it proves how well he was looked after as a young artist at Sega.

As Hidden Palace highlights, an individual named gageiro showcased a custom Mega CD BIOS created especially for Hoshino.

The BIOS file, a piece of firmware essential to running the Mega CD hardware, replaces the Mega CD logo with a Sonic-themed alternative, complete with the text 'Hoshino's Mega CD'.

Upon spotting the news online, Hoshino explained how the BIOS came to be:

"In 1991, I was a fresh new employee on the Mega CD dev team.

At the time, hardware-based rotation and scaling of graphics was something the Super Nintendo was known for. We finally made it happen on a SEGA system too—and I was so happy about it!

I was the only artist on the team, so I created the graphics needed for development. This test image was one of them.

Being the youngest on the team, my coworkers really looked after me. So they even made this awesome version just for me.

Seeing this again after all these years brings back so many memories. I’m really grateful for those days, and for the amazing people I got to work with."