The Dreamcast cannot performed commercially as expected by Sega so Sega discontinued the Dreamcast and withdrew itself from the console business on March 31, 2001. Now the company had change of plans so they replaced the CEO and restructured itself as a third-party developer. The Sega company main focus was now to develop and publish games for PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Advance. To celebrate the Sonic the Hedgehog series' 10th anniversary, the company planned and started the development of Sonic the Hedgehog Advance which was later renamed to Sonic Advance. Sonic Team got this project but don't have knowledge of GBA hardware so they hired Dimps to get the work done. The Dimps team have all the help from Sonic Team in the developing of Sonic Advance. If you want to know about Dimps then for your information, it was created by several former Neo Geo Pocket Color developers. Moreover, it got its funding from Sega, Sony, and Bandai. Also it was the same game developer Dimps whose members were behind the successful and famous Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure which was released for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. (Download and play sonic advance rom from here).

The Sonic Advance uses gameplay style like that of the original Sega Genesis Sonic games. The ability to grind on rails concept was used in Sonic Adventure which was relased in the year of 1998 so the developers also added this to Sonic Advance during the development. The artist Yuji Uekawa came up with modernized designs for this game. The game also features graphical techniques. As players can download minigames onto the Visual Memory Unit allowed by Sonic games which were released for DreamCast, the development team used a similar and expanded concept with the GameCube's GBA link cable. Thus this makes Sonic Advance one of the first games to use this cable.