[hfactor66]

It's clear that everyone here on TSC (or mostly everyone I would assume) is a fan of Sonic, but how did you come to know The Blue Blur in the first place? In other words, how did you become a Sonic fan?

When I was a kid I had a SEGA Genesis & several Sonic cartridges, I grew up playing Sonic. Then as I got older we got rid of the Gensis for a PS2, we got the mega collection plus Sonic game for that, so that game took me back. When I hit my early teen years I grew out of Sonic & almost forgot about it entirely, HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR MY CRUSH ON AMY ROSE. I also have a fetish with water peril, so what I would do late some nights was play specifically the levels that had a lot of water in them on Sonic Advance 3 & create water peril with Amy, and later on when I got my first iPod and a GBA emulator I did the same thing with Sonic Advance. What resparked my passion for Sonic was one weekend back in November 2013. I decided the second weekend in November 2013 to sit down & do a marathon sitting of my favorite childhood TV show, Sonic X. After that weekend, I remembered how much I love the Sonic series & became a fan once again.

What's your story?

Come back every day until New Years for new forum topics! Also thanks to Softspeak for this topic idea & the soundtrack topic idea! :)

[Softspeak]

First experience with Sonic. Oh boy, embarrassing story time.

When my twin brother and I turned 10, we got SA2B. (Dad quickly regretted the purchase -- the music was "too loud".) First playthrough of City Escape was pretty fun, even though it was also pretty rancid (solid rank E). Then I hit a wall. Couldn't land a hit on Big Foot. "Aim for the cockpit! That's the weak spot!" Well I tried, but my homing attacks kept going for Big Foot's legs. Big Foot was just an impossible boss. So we ended up playing a lot of City Escape for a while, then got bored with the game.

Some time later (weeks? months?) we came back. I figured I'd start the Dark story for kicks. Made it through Iron Gate. Then came Hot Shot. The bigger arena seemed to make things easier actually. I started my jumps farther away from the boss, and found that once I was within range for a homing attack, I was actually high enough to hit the cockpit! Came back to Big Foot and made the breakthrough: The longer you hold the jump button, the higher you jump! In my defense, I think this was the first 3-D game with an actual jump control I had ever played.

That wasn't the last obstacle we faced in this game, but it was by far the biggest. We were into the game now.

[Starlight_Glimmer]

my first experience with sonic was when i was 4 or 5 years old and I got a sega gen for christmas that came with sonic 3d blast. I spammed the game to hell and back forcing my parents to destroy the game. looking back now im suprised ive never tried to do anything competitively with the game nowadays.

what I believe actually pushed me over the edge to be a true sonic fan was the sonic SatAM tv show, I was always amazed at how cocky, and arrogant sonic was; These arent traits people normaly like, but I loved them. to this day im still one of the sonic purest; hes still by far my favorite character, and a distant second being amy. mainly because she likes sonic, and anyone who likes sonic is cool with me. (shout outs to marine the raccoon being my 3rd favorite!)

~you're to slow~

[TimpZ]

My second earliest memory is playing Emerald Hill, Chemical Plant and a few special stages in 1994 or so. When the Sonic & Knuckles Collection for PC came out in 1997 that was all I played for like a year. Been a fan since.

[theultimategamer95]

I was chosen by destiny...

...seriously though, when I was about 6 or so, I bought SADX (at least I THINK this was my first Sonic game?) for PC for Easter and have been loving the franchise ever since.

[SqwareEcks]

(copypasted from my earlier topic on this same subject)

WARNING: TL;DR

My absolute earliest memory of Sonic was hearing a neighbor kid a year younger than me discussing it back in the summer of 1991. He had a Genesis, and I did not; frankly, I didn't care as no games for it interested me. My NES was more than enough for me and I was biding my time waiting for the Super Nintendo to come out. We were outside, hanging out on summer vacation and talking, and he mentioned he'd played a new game called Sonic the Hedgehog. "He's like, this hedgehog who can run like 120 MPH," I remember him saying. "It's so cool."

I was unimpresssed. I had just discovered Final Fantasy and was diving into RPGs for the first time, and the only Genesis game I'd even played was Altered Beast, which bored me. I wrote the game off mentally.

A few weeks later, I hassled my mother into taking me to the nearest Funcoland (now Gamestop) to let me look at the newest games and see if they were paying anything for games I'd be interested in selling. This was sometime in late July or August, 1991. I went into the store and looked around a bit and some very good music caught my ears. I looked over at one of the Genesis demo units the store had set up and saw this bright, beautiful, colorful landscape and this blue creature standing in the middle of it. Someone had been playing it and walked away, leaving the game running instead of pausing it. The blue creature was staring straight out at me and tapping his feet, with an expression on his face that said "What are you waiting for?"

I went over and grabbed the controller. I started playing. I noticed as he ran faster and faster his legs started spinning around in circles like in a Roadrunner cartoon; I found this awesome. He collected rings, not coins. There were loops and tunnels and collapsing ledges. This was beyond Mario. Being used to Mario, I had to adjust to not being able to just drop onto enemies; I had to jump or spin onto them to not take damage. I made it to the end of the stage, and a screen came up that said "SONIC HAS PASSED ACT 1." I finally put two and two together: This was the game my neighbor was talking about. This was Sonic the Hedgehog. My mother eventually had to pull me away from the machine to get me to put it down. I think I made it to Act 2 of Marble Zone.

(end copypasta)

That was my first experience with Sonic. I was hooked in a major way although I couldn't play it regularly until I got a Genesis more than two years later. I was addicted to both of the old TV series as well. I remember the first time they aired the final episode of SATAM I missed it because they abruptly moved it to a half hour earlier time slot so all I got to see were the final credits. I managed to catch it on a re-run, but by my memory they only re-ran it once before it was cancelled. Then I kind of quit the series for a decade due to lack of Saturn/Dreamcast access, before I finally got pulled back in by SA2.

[Starlight_Glimmer]

1991? your old, but that was actually a good read. so far I think you have portrayed our feels ( the 90's~ 95's club ) with much better adjectives about sonic than anyone else. man I miss them days.

[Softspeak]

When I hit my early teen years I grew out of Sonic & almost forgot about it entirely, HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR MY CRUSH ON AMY ROSE. I also have a fetish with water peril, so what I would do late some nights was play specifically the levels that had a lot of water in them on Sonic Advance 3 & create water peril with Amy, and later on when I got my first iPod and a GBA emulator I did the same thing with Sonic Advance.

Wish I could say I never fed a fetish of my own using Sonic characters (and a few of my own creation). But I did. It's hard for me to talk about, but I think this deserves a second, more humbling story.

It started maybe eight years ago with thinking up a story of my own and daydreaming. Needless to say, some of the threads of the story went way too far; that's where the fetish took root. All in all, I devoted a lot of free time to all the threads of the story, and the fetish made it hard for me to fall asleep too. I never limited myself to one character, but if I had to pick one, it would've been Rouge. Somehow the fetish died down a bit after a few years, and the daydream stories started getting more realistic. Since I'm pretty bad at social interaction, it became more of a life simulator for me: what's right conduct, what do conversations really look like, etc. (Admittedly not a great simulator. Probably the only thing that improves social skills is practice doing the real thing.)

Then three years ago the fetish struck again, hard. It took on another form entirely, creating a whole new fantasy world (I'll call it "mind porn") and leaving the Sonic-inspired daydreams in the dust. Mind porn didn't just mean new settings and events (and some characters), it meant a whole new way of thinking. And I was captivated by it. Probably half of my time I've been awake since then has been spent either giving in to the mind porn, or looking for material to feed it, or (especially in the past year) fighting it. I'm glad I started fighting it, hard. The struggle isn't over yet, though. It's still present in my thoughts to some degree, and it needs to be eradicated completely.

As for the Sonic-inspired stuff, that still takes up far too much of my thinking time, even though I've effectively written out most of the borrowed characters. There's some personal encouragement and other good stuff that I still draw from it, but there's also a tenuous connection to the mind porn. If I really want to keep it, I ought to detach it from the Sonic universe entirely; and I don't even think it would be good in the long-term for me to keep it. That time would be better spent dwelling on bigger things. And maybe I wanna play Sonic games without any of that other stuff lingering over my head, you know?

I don't know how much people will really take from this. I guess my point is that many of us are on TSC (as opposed to other sites) not only because the Sonic games are naturally good choices for competition, but also because we've gotten a little obsessed with something in the Sonic universe. I suspect I'm not the only one who's had such an obsession become a struggle and a burden.

[PvtCinnamonbun]

Autism

[Vallkyr]

As kids, we only had Nintendo consoles. As such, my first Sonic games were the Adventure games + Heroes. I quite enjoyed them (though Adventure 1 to a lesser extent) and Adventure 2 Battle was my favorite game overall for a long time. On a side note, I used to think it was "Sonic Adventure Battle 2". Not sure why. The logo clearly shows "Battle" below the 2.

Anyway, after that I don't think I played any Sonic games until Generations. At the time I thought Generations was merely alright, due to not having nostalgia for all the stages, and not being used to the controls, being vastly different from the GC games.
At school a friend of mine said he got Sonic Colours and really enjoyed it. First I was skeptical of it. My attitude toward it was basically "I don't want no Kirby mechanics in my Sonic games". That was until I actually tried playing it and really enjoyed it. Still wasn't a big fan of the transformations but definetly didn't mind them.

Some time after that I replayed Generations and learned about Unleashed. Unleashed looked like loads of fun and I couldn't wait to play it. At this point I liked Generations a lot more aswell, and it was my substitute for Unleashed until I could finally afford to buy a PS3 for it.
Been branching out eversince, trying my hands at the classic games (and failing because they're hard and I refuse to use save states) and a couple of others.

[DGF]

I was first introduced to sonic when i was 4 years old (1995 for those wondering).He was the very first video game and franchise I played and it was then i discovered video games (i have a lot to owe him). what i like about it at the time was that it was colorful and felt like you were a boss when you sped through Green hill zone. I kept dying on Labyrinth zone and i think we all know why. I didn't what was it that drove me to this game, but everyday, i would go to my Dad's house just so i could play all day. As I grew up, I have played a lot of other games (Zelda, Final Fantasy, Gunstar Heroes, Metroid). I realized that i loved sonic because of his speed and i felt proud for everytime i beat a stage.

As of Today, I now pretty own mostly sonic stuff, the games, Archie Comics, posters. Yeah I'm a pretty big nerd of the blue blur, I', hoping to go to sonic boom next year hopefully. The Boost Gameplay is currently my favorite gameplay of all the sonic play styles

[Mastakirby]

My dads brother gave him a genesis about a month before I was born and it was the only system we had for about 10 years. Because of this I didn't know other systems existed and all I played on it was Sonic so he just grew on me heh.

[DarkPolarNight]

When I first played Sonic 1. Just loved the gameplay and music. Still remember my first time on Green Hill Zone, and finding act 2 hard, (because of that part with moving platforms with gaps+spikes in between each one). That checkpoint halfway through proved useful at the time. Little did I know that was nothing, compared to Labyrinth act 3.

Must have been '98 or '99 when I first played Sonic 2. I loved that game even more, due to the spindash and Tails. I found it easier, but I couldn't defeat Death egg, at the time. I'd even arrive with 50+ lives, and still fail.

Then, it was Sonic Adventure, and it was awesome to have talking characters, more of them, the storylines, and the unique feeling of playing 3D for first time. Was on a standstill on Big's Twinkle Park though. I remember starting everything again, since I thought I missed a tool you HAD to collect, just to be able to fish.

I remember being given Sonic Advance one Christmas as well. After beating it, I always enjoyed to beat my times on the TA mode, particular over the Christmas holidays.....some time later the same again happened on TSC :P

That pretty much sums how I got into Sonic over-time. S1/S2 remain amongst my favourite games to play casual-the way I've also enjoyed them - which is why I haven't gone competitive in these.

[SB737]

I was born in 1997, but my older brother (12 years older than me) had both a mega drive and master system. I grew up playing on those all the time, from about the age of 2, and I had beaten sonic 1 and 2 on SMS by the time I was 3. I also played sonic 1 and 2 on mega drive quite a bit, but never managed to beat them, the labyrinth 3 boss always stopped me, and so did the death egg. My master system broke, and my mega drive was dying, so when I was about 7? I think, my dad bought me a gamecube with sonic mega collection on it, I played on it all the time, but it would be some years till I beat all the games on it. I also had 3d blast on PC, which I played a lot, until I got stuck on the volcanoes valley 3 boss, but once I got a controller I managed to beat that stage ( I've always sucked at keyboards :P). I really loved the adventure games, had sa1 on PC, borrowed from a friend, and played sa2 at a friends house. The first sonic game I ever preordered was generations, and that's the game that got me into speed running.

[soniccoloursunleashed]

Beaten sonic 1 and sonic 2 at the age of 3 wow! that must be a record or in fact 2 records.

I first heard of the blue  hedgehog when I was 5. A cousin of mine had sonic advance and I was watching him play neo green hill act 1, I liked the look of sonic with those big spikes,red shoes, blue colour and his spin dash. I forgot to ask him what the blue blur was called and had to wait till a year  later to find out. I saw an advert on t.v of sonic advance 2, sonic blazing through a level and that was when I found out his name was SONIC! That was when I felt that I must get a game of this guy. But I had to wait another year before I got my very first sonic game sa2b. It had the best multiplayer I had ever played. I couldnt get past the first two bosses of both stories for 2 years. Sonic X was my favourite tv programme and I really liked sonic's character. From then on I bought many sonic games and have enjoyed all of them. Thats my story.