Sonic Cult takes me back. They had a page dedicated to an item monitor I found in Scrap Brain Zone, hidden in the background and used my user name at the time for the page name. 2001? 2002? Something like that. I legit didn't think that place was still around on the internet,till now at least. Woah.
This feels like I'm having a stroke. Like, I know the words on that page, but when I read them, it doesn't make any fucking sense.
Oh god, that Keep'n doom comic! The comic audio dub is still at youtube, I like to come back to it from time to time, last one was a few weeks ago! ( Original comic is in Spanish, I can make a correct translation if you want but... the original sillyness of that horrible translation is what makes it hilarious)
RIP CulT. Many hours of free time were spent there, including the donation drive for the Sonic Mars script. It pretty much shaped my attitude on fan characters, fan ficiton, etc. Not to stir up drama, but did anyone salvage everything from the trashbin? I kind of wanted to see that old Andy Wolan video one more time.
RIP Cult. It was one of the first major Sonic website I visited back in the early 2000s. I spent hours reading their pages and their forums.
CulT was one of my most cherished internet time capsules. So much culture on that site. I miss IRC chats, sprite comics, webrings and public shaming. History will tell us we were right to let the Boy's Club aspect of the internet go, but that time where a couple of savvy teens could piece this technology together to build their own communities was something formative and valuable to me. I was too young to get away with participating, but I still think about this shit all the time. I thought about it last Monday during lunch out of the blue. "Sazpaimon banned me with a click click / sure enough, I wet my pants, drip drip" While we're here, anyone know where to find that thread archiving Dusthillguy's Saxman harassment? Is it still out there? That's on Retro/Simon Wai but what better place to ask.
It sure did provide a lot of good stuff, but in the end the information on there hadn't been updated in years. A lot of it is available in higher quality now and some of the stuff that was still on there wasn't even true in the first place (SA2 Examples: This is the Japanese version's logo, and this shows up when you don't have all the upgrades).
I forgot that place was even a thing until hearing about it today, I'm not a hacker or anything but my memories of the place were bad from my side of the pond.
Goodbye, CulT. You were a cesspool that was important to me at a formative time in my life, but I guess it's probably for the best that we grow up and move forward. That said, I'm still a 31 year old on a Sonic the Hedgehog fan forum so maybe I shouldn't talk.
Does Sir B still hang around these parts? I feel like this part of the community's saga can't truly end without one last SIR B DRAW PLZ
A while back, I googled my old CulT forum handle, and boy was that a cringe-fest. The site was great at one point, and there were a few great people in the forums, but boy, was there a lot of BS. Kinda glad I got banned, and kinda glad to see it gone. I imagine most people from the community don't use their handles from CulT anymore either. With some exceptions.
Random note actually - you could argue, given Retro evolved from SWS2B which came from Classic, y'all won. =P
Man, now there's a name that brings back some memories. I remember the Moogle Cavern being the cool "alternative" to SFGHQ during Sonic fangaming's heyday. Spent many nights there in the early 2000s engaging in discussion and posting Sega/Sonic threads. Even became good friends with the forum owner Kulock. Seems like forever ago now. I still remember when he suddenly shut the place down and the userbase revolted and formed Sonic Eats Rings which though is still up seems to have become depressingly inactive years ago going by the timestamps on some of the threads there. I still don't even remember why Kulock pulled the plug. Guess real life must have gotten in the way or something.
I'll be honest.., I'm not sure I actually even visited Moogle Cavern. I just remember that people on CulT didn't like it and I was an asshole teenager who was happy to talk shit about anyone and anything. I'm sure Kulock and everybody else were fine people. I think like 90% of my posts were just me trashing other people now that I think about it. I don't think anyone really knew me for anything significant. (I went by the name Slash and had a red PSO rare item box as an avatar if anyone wants to correct me on that)
I've got to admit, I had actually tried to log in to the Cult Forums not too long ago to check out the Steam User list before I found the Steam Group for Cult and found that I couldn't log in anymore. I was operating under the assumption it wasn't going to last much longer anyways because of technical issues several times I checked lately. Still, sad to see it go. So many vibrant communities once, and I really am going to miss a lot of it. Between social media and chat apps forums are a lost art. Not really a positive change to me, it seems like a less ordered way to operate generally. The older internet felt a lot less homogeneous and more unique, distinctive. There was identity, camaraderie, and despite so many rivalries there was never a lack of something to experience. Sonic HQ, Moogle Cavern, Area 51, GHZ, here and earlier iterations, as well as Cult. It's nice that at least part of the community is still together to reminisce the good old days. I still lurk Sonic Eats Rings from time to time as well for nostalgia purposes. I do hope there are copies of the forums for Cult released though. It would be nice to have the memories. Reminds me that Sega's forums are migrating because the forum was plagued by bots and spam. Oh, just remembered, there was an older SCARZ archive, and I can't remember if Cult also hosted that too. I may wish to check that later to see what may be around still if not. There were posts active on Cult around Mania's release. They said Cult died waiting for Sonic Mania. They aren't wrong. And before Mania Plus too. Feels hollow.
To be honest, even in 2003/2004 it was annoying to have essentially one discussion spread across three or four fairly prominent message boards. It was inevitable that the number would filter down. Twitter and Facebook have moved into the territory once occupied by the "pointless" forums - you know the sort, ones that were only vaguely associated with a topic, and were mainly just used for friends to talk to each other. Everyone was registering hosted versions of IPB or phpBB or whatever back in the day - if you had a site, you had to have a forums. Now nobody has either since spoilers: half the planet never really needed this stuff. But Twitter's been around a decade and it hasn't really stopped these forums from being a thing. There aren't as many prototype discoveries and hidden things in games as there once were so it's veered towards more mainstream Sonic stuff, but that's probably because there's a lot less to find. That said, we're overdue for some sort of prototype haul~
I still wish something would have come in and capitalized on the Ezboard/Yuko concept for a universal forum host honestly to keep communities "pointless" and diverse. I don't mind forums slowly aggregating to larger communities, as well as the fact I know there are still communities around and it's not hard to see that Reddit, Neogaf or ResetEra have kind have filled those roles on a larger scale but it doesn't feel like a tight knit community to me in most cases. The same with most social media where there isn't a cohesion of topics beyond "this person posted" or trending topics that give you an idea what's big at a given time. Even then with larger forums now the centralization leads to huge discussions where ideas are easily buried or abuses by the team running something so large. I'm really just sad there isn't a huge middle ground. It's like how a diverse game market just stratified into Triple A Titles, Indies, and less the pool of variety there was once. Not the end of the world, and not that there aren't some still left, just kind of irksome. Also, part of the reason I do enjoy discord as much as I do.</nostalgia rant> I understand the community shift here, and that isn't something I'm really worried about because there will always be another game released and things to ferret out of them. But yes, a good prototype haul would be amusing. Edit: I forgot to include an "old man yells at clouds" reference. So there it is.
