I've been a Sonic fan for almost as long as I've been alive. When I was really young, not sure how young exactly but my brother (who's only two years younger than me) was still a toddler so I must have been tiny, my dad got himself as a PS1 as the prices started to come down and me and my brother got our parents consoles as hand-me-downs, my brother the SNES and me the SEGA MegaDrive, along with Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Sonic ended up being the very first game I played!
I followed the series pretty closely most of my young life then. My dad bought me a Dreamcast with Sonic Adventure as a Christmas present way back in '99 the year it released, and me and my brother kept up with just about everything that released across the my Dreamcast, his GameCube and the family PS2. Watched Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic Underground every time we caught them on TV, bought copies of the Archie comics from a comic book importing store (strangely never saw a single issue of Fleetway anywhere even growing up in the UK), my brother even still has our childhood DVD copies of the Sonic OVA and the Sonic Underground complete box set. Even long after we got the family Xbox 360 me and my brother would still burn away days raising chao in SA2B or devising new silly routes through Shadow the Hedgehog.
As for actually getting into the
fandom, I don't know
exactly when it was but back when I was in Secondary School I finally got my own PC in my bedroom to get onto the internet more often than just playing Flash games when I should've been doing work at school. One of the first fandom sites I latched onto was actually an earlier incarnation of this very site! I was Sonic obsessed for years, I remember being crazy excited for Sonic '06 after playing the Xbox Live Arcade demo, and then crushed when it actually came out in the state it did.
I dropped off the fandom somewhere in the early 2010s. I'd been lucky as a kid, we weren't super well-off but my dad was as gaming obsessed as me and my brother and one of my dad's old college friends was a bootlegger, so most of the games we had weren't actually legitimate copies but with the money saved buying games instead we had basically every console that came out in the house somewhere and we got our hands on nearly anything that came out that we wanted to try. Console piracy both got harder and started to have a lot more drawbacks what with Xbox Live and the like from the 360 onwards so we couldn't and didn't keep doing it, and once I started being responsible for my own money I couldn't afford to keep up with grabbing nearly every Sonic game that came out anymore.
I wandered through a few different fandoms since (some more embarassing than others) but fatigue with the modern internet and social media across the 2010s and the exhaustion of adult life eventually saw me drift away from fandom completely, Sonic or otherwise, outside of occasionally glancing at what insane "discourse" was happening on Twitter from week to week. Still kept up with the mainline games, at least up until Forces, but not so much with fandom.
Recently though I've been trying to "rekindle" my love for the franchise of sorts, maybe because I just miss the games I used to love with all the turmoil in the gaming industry recently, maybe just because I'm pushing 30 this year and I need to chase my childhood back down before the way the internet warps our view of age and time makes me feel so old my bones turn to dust
.
Been going through just about every game in the franchise I can get my hands on or getting running in an emulator from the very beginning in order of release and it's been fun. It's slow going because I've been going through it with a few friends and scheduling doesn't always permit all of us being there with not enough going on to just watch one of us play an old platformer, but I'm just about finishing up everything in the Classic era of Sonic about to move onto Adventure. It's been interesting running through all the weird old games from back then and trying to think about them in the context of the era and what else was out at the time instead of just seeing them as "kinda crappy unlockables" in SADX/Mega Collection. Maybe I'll make a thread of my own talking about my thoughts and quick-reviews on each of the games when I get done with the last of the Classic era games if anyone would find that interesting?
Anyway, sorry for clogging the thread with the huge rambling wall of text!