This site’s got a lot of history, it has. Launched on the 24th October 2000, The Sonic Stadium has risen from being a small little fansite with excitable gibberish to… well, a large fansite with excitable gibberish. From here you can discover a whole lot about what made the site tick back in the day, awards that we have recieved in the past, and even what this place used to look like back in the day. Check out more information using the links below (or if you get lost, Alice, they’re slapped in the sidebar there too).

• TSS Timeline – Read the story of The Sonic Stadium, year by year.
  2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011
• Awards Shelf – Look at all those Eggman Robots website prizes.
• Old TSS Layouts – The many faces of the ‘Stadium.

About The Sonic Stadium

Svend ‘Dreadknux’ Joscelyne: Well, hello there. Didn’t see you come in. You’re here to learn about The Sonic Stadium and how it came to be, am I right? Or are you looking for some food? Go on, grab some chicken from the fridge, and let me tell you a story…

The Sonic Stadium, also known as ‘TSS’ (coined by our users round about 2003), is quite an old site by today’s standards. And yet, it’s still pretty young as far as other sites in the community go – some places like Sonic HQ have been around since 1996. Ever since this place launched in 2000 though it has had something of an interesting history.

It all started in 1999, when my school had access to this new thing called the ‘Internet’. This nicely co-incided with SEGA’s big comeback (at the time!) with the Dreamcast console and Sonic Adventure. Schoolkids were wasting no time downloading ROMs for the Mega Drive to avoid textbook work at all costs. It was pretty cool, after years of forgetting that Sonic even existed, to see teacher-defiant monitors across the school load up Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

One day I had the urge to search for Sonic the Hedgehog websites on the Internet at school, believing that I’d pretty much be alone in my enthusiasm (nobody at my school really seemed to give a toss about Sonic). Lo and behold there were hundreds of thousands of results, and I found a home with like-minded fans on a website called The Moogle Cavern (R.I.P.).

After spending time enjoying hoaxes of Eggman in tutus (none of my schoolmates really knew what was going on) and taking part in the forums, I figured I should give a Sonic website a go. I knew a fair bit about the series, so maybe I should apply that and share my knowledge (and learning) with the world. Using a brand new computer I started learning HTML in March 2000, from a bit of a ‘for dummies’ book (big lettering, hold-your-hand teenage writing basically). I named the site the first thing that came into my head – “Sonic Stadium” – and ran with that. The website officially launched on the 24th October, 2000.

At first things didn’t go too smoothly. I went through the same silly “Why won’t anyone visit my site” phase that most new webmasters suffer, until I realised that the content I had wasn’t any different from stuff people could find at more trusted places like the Sonic Foundation (also, R.I.P.). When I created the Sonic Site Awards and SEGASonic Radio in 2001, along with my constant waffling on about Sonic Adventure 2, people started to notice TSS. Things really blew up in 2003 and by 2004 this humble site had become the primary place for many fans to learn about Sonic.

A banner TSS used to celebrate Shadow Week, the first time a fansite and SEGA collaborated.

In 2005, pending the release of Shadow the Hedgehog, I approached SEGA Europe with an aim of forging a closer bond between SEGA and the fan community. TSS suddenly became a site that couldn’t go any higher to one that has catalysed a special relationship between the game makers and the fans. Following that approach, SEGA Europe established a bona fide Community department to work with fan sites, which began with the legendary Romily Broad and continues with close community friend ArchAngelUK.

2006 and 2007 has seen plenty of activity from the news area of The Sonic Stadium, but updates on a general scale have been far and few between save for some up-close-and-personals with SEGA luminaries such as Yojiro Ogawa, Simon Jeffrey, Lee Brotherton and Richard Jacques. During University courses and real life issues, I have had less time to devote to TSS. It didn’t go unnoticed, with many fellow sites commenting on the lack of activity in this place.

Being a pretty old and established site from the 2000 Internet Boom, it has been difficult for The Sonic Stadium to fully embrace new technologies that are now available to many. Now I’m changing the site with more than the million-and-one cosmetic alterations it’s had over the years – the whole website has been re-imagined for easier updating and better reporting on what is new in the world of Sonic.

Looking back on everything while I make this transition, TSS has had an extraordinary ride as a Sonic the Hedgehog fansite. From mergers (and surviving the death of said mergers) to forum sabotages (from our own staff) and events such as Summer of Sonic, we have a history that’s worthy of… a lot.

If you would like to explore our history (more old stuff is being added as we collate it), you only need to head to our Archives section – alternatively view other pages in the ‘Site’ section to learn more about the early days of The Sonic Stadium.