Thing is that I was born before Sonic, and was, and still am, a huge fan. Sonic's arms always varied by which style he was in; the classic games had tan arms, partly designed so that they would be easily visible on his sprites ala Mario's mustache to identify his mouth, but Adventure and Modern era has blue arms.

I'm kind of skeptical on this one, because I'm not so sure if everyone who swears that he had blue arms on the boxart for the first game was just simply too young to have played it in the first place, and simply assumed because there was no reason to notice that the arms were tan when they grew up with blue arms. After all, the modern redesign is 20 years old at this point, and cheese I'm old.