Well, after a little over a month and a half of research, I finally put together this little video. I don't know how well of a job I did covering the information (some parts are certainly shorter than others), but I would love to know and hear any corrections!
Hi! I always appreciate the enthusiasm you have for making these. You put a lot of work into, and it really shows. However, I must point out a pretty major correction that is in order here, and the issue actually occurs at the beginning of the video. Contrary to what you state, ROM hacks were *not* commonly referred to as hoaxes. They were were always just ROM hacks. Cyan's hoax was a hoax, as was the Sonic 3 beta hoax I did. But the rest of them were always acknowledged as hacks. The hoaxes that were popular in the early days, starting in 1998, were actually mockup screenshots. Andre Dirk's Secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog website made these enormously popular.
I would add that Cyan called it a "beta" to draw the public's attention to Sonic ROM hacking by highlighting it's potential, and get other people interested in it.
I remember being extremely proud, aged 14, at being the first (at least as far as I knew) to create a hoax based on the Simon Wai S2 Beta, the day it was “discovered” on 1st January 1999, and it being posted on the Moogle Cavern the next day. It was an image of Knuckles standing next to the Master Emerald in HPZ. And only today, nearly 26 years later, do I discover said hoax is still online, at the bottom of this page: http://mooglemb.com/pages/classic/segasonic/hoaxes/secman/pg01.html. Some of the others on that page I barely remember creating. It was simpler times back then…
