Geez, that site brings back uncomfortable memories. I wasn't really part of the community, though, just a lurker. It was also linked to one of my dumb teenager moments back on the SRB2 forums. But at this point the site is better off as an archive. Place was basically a proto-chan and honestly is better off dead now that the scene has migrated to other places.
So this topic came up on a friend's account on social media the other day and I posted my thoughts there. After checking my post history I didn't post anything here? Here's what I posted there: The first owner was, yes. I was a kid in high school when the CulT drama and raids and stuff were big, and I had this big idea in my head of him as this big serious bad guy and the people I knew online were a force of good fighting him or something. He left the scene for awhile and as time went on I saw that the people I had looked up to were... less than clean themselves, to put it nicely. This just makes me all the happier that I mostly stayed out of the drama when a raid would happen and as I said above I'd just chill with whoever showed up. When the first owner left the scene, he handed control off to someone else (was it that he handed control to Saz directly? I remember something about the site being for sale and Saz ending up with it as well, but that doesn't make sense if the first owner handed it right over) and from what I recall the first owner even sent a hand-written letter to the dude saying that he's sorry for trouble he's caused people and etc. etc. I forgave the guy that day and thought that would be the end of it. YEARS later he started hanging out in #retro for awhile and we got to be friends. It was kind of surreal that I'd be chilling with someone that kid-me thought of as like the big bad or whatever of the community, but he's genuinely a good dude. Since then I've drifted away from IRC where we'd hang out, he deleted his account on a social media site, and I drifted away from Youtube where he'd post hilarious videos from time to time. Yeah man, I drew up an whole infographic about this for an Oldbie lounge post YEARS ago and after acquiring permission from the artist (myself), SS put it on the wiki:
Seeing online communities come and go is sad. I tend to miss the people, but thankfully most of the people are still here at Retro which has been playing its cards right. drx Overlord, =P Borisz LocalH IceKnight Dude - he eats/sleeps/breathes Sonic Adventure Nemesis - funnily enough ran into him on gamedev forums Cryomancer - see him on IRC; sorry for your gf's passing, -_-' Demi - played a ton of PSO on PC with that dude SSNTails Lightning Taxman Ooh, Nega...something, forgot his name, he did guitar covers of Sonic songs. Had them saved for years but lost them recently. Stoko - fun times discussing why we both disliked The Dark Knight over AIM; no idea what happened to her SirB - or him; hopefully dancing away in some Euro-techno club JumpAlice - or her Trunks - was it you that made that game called Love? Cinossu - awesome music; I recently refound the track I had used of yours, that someone re-uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNj21R4AucQ EDIT: Updated avatar/sig to match Sonic-Cult's.
Who told Pat and Ian about this lmao? It kinda got barely a passing mention and some chuckles. Also, this happened in the comments: Never change, Andy.
Cult probably could have taken over the internet if we weren't such a ragtag group of boneheads. I remember when "Green Egg" and "X-Cult" were first launched with lofty ambitions to create a collaborative, user-generated repository - basically attempting to invent a "wiki" type system before anyone had ever heard of Wikipedia. Alas, we'll never know if we could have succeeded, because instead of being disciplined and working hard, we were more interested in boobpix and being pricks.
I'm sure someone will do a dump of all the data eventually, but until they get around to it, I've dutifully archived it for posterior posterity.
You know Candescence, it's actually pretty funny you called the atmosphere a proto-chan, since at one point there was I do believe an X-Cult image board that was practically never used was made and withered away very quickly. So that was a bullet that was dodged. It's weird how well so much of the communities are just ingrained with us all at this point. I actually went out and started looking up a lot of the old communities because of this. Kinda odd seeing how active/inactive some of them are now, and what is just gone outright. I do hope we see an archive of the sites/forum since it is a lot of memories to be drudged up. Nostalgic lately.
Fucking wow. He's still bitter about the whole thing? It's been over 15 years now Andy, and you said you were "too old to be running a videogame website" (and by extension, caring about it) even at the time. He must be in his late 40s now. Let it go, dude. =P NegaC. I've still got a bunch if you want to hit me up on Discord.
I don't know, man. If you include SSRG then the whole thing gets kind of messy and raises more questions. Do you start with the emulationzone.org/secrets/sonic site or the ssrg.emulationzone.org domain? What of the other sites hosted on SSRG, like SFGHQ or Stealth's corner? Can the gravestone image be incorporated somehow? Is it more of a history of SSRG at that point than Sonic Retro? Then there are the questions that I'm sure have answers, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten them. Questions like "When did [site x] leave SSRG?" Please do feel free to make a better one if you would like, though! I made this when someone asked about Sonic Retro's history in the Oldbie lounge. I remember starting to type a reply then going "Okay yeah this is a mess, I'll draw a picture instead." Shortly after I discovered the arrow tool in MSPaint and went ham. If I were making a modern version I'd consider including CulT as well; the days when CulT hosted the Sonic Retro IRC channel (or was it still the S2Beta IRC channel back then?) definitely influenced the community. There was never a direct merger like the others, though; Sonic Retro just kind of absorbed a lot of CulT's userbase through osmosis. Man he's STILL holding a grudge after all of these years? I wonder if even the mention of the site is having the same bloody effect as he posted about way back when haha.
Some folks have nothing better to do than hold grudges. I'd know, I spent years pretty much being one of them. Twitter is a hell of a drug.
It's been hard to find the words for this. Yes, we all moved on to other sites years ago, probably for the better, but CulT was a formative place for me and I'm sad to see it go. If there's any of the old old family still reading this thread, I want to thank you all for being so nice to an (at the time, 11 years ago (oh my god)) green-behind-the-ears-newcomer, and I want to thank Saz for keeping the old girl running for so many years. It was really the first place I felt like I BELONGED on the internet as a kid; rough around the edges and offbeat and hilarious as hell. I wish more of the internet was more like CulT in those ways. It was certainly a one-of-a-kind experience regardless of how you felt about the place.
Obligatory RIP post. Also this is really strange for me because after not going back there for a good 8/9 years, I randomly went on the forums a couple of weeks ago and browsed through. So much embarrassing stuff but a lot of good memories too. It was definitely a shitshow at times but it had something special that'll always be a part of my formative years. Shout out to Stoko for the 1337 avatar too.
He talks as if "SWS2B" is still a thing. He claims his information is "current". I actually have no idea how old he is compared to me, but I'm 38 now.
Well I just dug out the New SSRG Maintainer Speech MP3 (yes, all 3 hours of it) and he mentions at around the 21 minute mark (I cheated a bit by using Pachuka's gaaaaaaaaaaaay.mp3 to skip around it a bit easier as I knew it was at the start) that he was 25 at the time, and as that was 2002 this would make him 41 now (actually a bit younger than I thought he was but yeah, in his 40s). Also BSF the word you're looking for is bunchies. =P
