Chimes
Jesus Christ, you people are getting scary!
...Uh, yeah. Didn't know how else to start this.
Anyways, hi! My name's Chimes. I'm a fan of the Sonic games, and have been playing them for all my life.
I'm also a geriatric player of Sonic Robo Blast 2.
I know that sounds weird to any outsider but bare with me, there's a reason why I elaborate this.
If you've ever trainspotted fangames, you've for sure known about SRB2's ridiculously long development history.
In fact, Sonic Robo Blast 2 is so old that most people who've played it are younger than the game itself.
During that... time abyss, various communities and cultures have sprung around the game's online multiplayer and around the world.
Some have lasted for a long time, others barely get remembered except by a random twenty something going through their memories while in the shower.
In that time, there was a great wealth of knowledge and culture shifts that kind of got muddled or lost to time as the game got older and bigger.
I... much to my head's chagrin, was around to see many of these shifts.
At the ripe age of... holy christ, 9 years old, I first played in Summer 2013, which puts me around the range of late May - August. Initially I thought I played in November, but the timeline didn't add up and contemporary evidence shows that I was playing for quite a while, with hazy memories of having to upgrade to 2.0.7 on my potato Windows Vista tower after my first few Multiplayer games. I used to go by the name "Bun", "Dumi", "Guest135", and at one point "Jade Reuben". I am so sorry to those who got subject to me as a total menace. Whoof.
Anyways, I've been playing for a stupidly long time, and in that time, I more or less saw a game turn from a Sonic fandom curiosity, into this hulking beanstalk of a internet cornerstone that has attracted people of all ages: there's literally a generation gap of SRB2 players for every 5 years that pass. And as I got older, I began to realize: hey, no one's really talking about the stuff I've seen. Why not talk about the stuff that isn't really around anymore and what's changed?
So starting in 2021, I shared a ton of anecdotes, and wrote what can be classified as a gonzo journalist piece about my experiences with the game's community on the official SRB2 server, which I later compiled to a deep web Google Docs document: "The Ramblings Of A Grizzled Sonic Fangame Community Veteran".
Looking back at it now, ehhhhh the prose has aged like milk, I shouldn't have abused profanity since it made it hard to absorb the information at a gleam, there were some pretty questionable comparisons, but there really wasn't much like it outside of Kart Krew's very own history text nudged inside SRB2 Kart's files.
I was initially hesitant to release it out in the open, and only shared it with those in the know / my close friends' DMs to give context when I was talking about the SRB2 community, mainly due to the fear that what I was talking about might alienate those who were there, but as the years passed I realized that most people who actually would know what I'm talking about are in their mid to late twenties/thirties and probably have kids by this point: they probably have bigger things to worry about than some guy recounting a ephemeral period of niche internet history.
Plus, Sarah Z has talked about similar niche Tumblr history and has noted in her video essays that it was simply the culture of the time. I feel something similar applies here: I was a total dumb kid back then, but it really was the culture of the time and I didn't really know any better.
With that being said, it is with honor (read: OH MY GOD THIS IS SO OLD) that I publish here a record of things that happened quite some time ago, The Ramblings Of A Grizzled Sonic Fangame Community Veteran. (Boy, that name sucks.)
docs.google.com
Also, if you see something like "Climax Age" or "Redefining Age", those were my terms for the late 2.0 era and 1.09 era respectively. I tried doing a thing where I tried classifying periods... it didn't catch on. Sorry for the confusion!
Here's a overview of each chapter.
Chapter 1 starts with a brief, yet loaded grievance about the original state of the community's moderation and its initial closed nature, unfriendly to those who were just getting in. During that time, social media as we know it didn't exist yet, so most communication began with the game itself and occasionally online venues like this very forum and #srb2fun from IRC.
Chapter 2 is a account of the noticeable lack of any proper, accessable tools for modifying the game, and how the levels reflected this. Zone Builder's sole existence owes itself to solving a problem that went unsolved for years. Anyone who were willing to make any maps of any kind had to know computer science, industrial drafting, and architecture beforehand. Because of this, most maps in the 2.0 era were structurally protrusive, and never had any loops or slopes to speak of. The reason becomes more apparent as you read on...
Chapter 3 is a writeup on the rather cumbersome way mods used to be available, with the game not letting you download anything that was "too big".
In that period, files being incredibly hard to acquire was a very common problem, taking place in a culture where self-hosting just wasn't there yet.
4shared being a sign-up service was a daunting barrier because emails were... let's face it, they kinda stunk at the time, especially for verification.
I had to rely on a back alley method of downloading these files using a website that doesn't exist anymore.
I made note of a very intriguing divide that no one really spoke of: the files people played and what was actually promoted on the SRB2MB were vastly different.
Part of this was in part homebrewing of custom material people made, but part of it was also the restrictive regime the community operated under during most of the 2010s, with popular WADs like House22 being paradoxically popular yet hard to acquire.
There was a vetoing process all files in the forums underwent, which was very strict. It was survivorship bias at its meanest. What's on the MB didn't reflect what was actually being played at the time: sure, people played Tortured Planet, but they also played House23 and TheFinalSonicTeam.
Chapter 4 further builds on what Chapter 3 left with a emphasis on the then-prevalent elitism that in many ways shaped the game's community and development, with creative stagnation and a unhealthy moderation team being a prominent element.
One thing that was very common was the idolization of certain players. I don't know if it's still common - gosh, I haven't really gotten knee deep in SRB2 culture in about two years by now, - but players like ThatSRB2Dude often were swarmed and hawked by players because of their skill and were often used as comparison, and with a small world of people coming across each other, this often turned pretty nasty.
The grumpy development leadership also stagnated creative development, with experimental slopes not being put in the game for years due to doubt.
This caused the aforementioned level design to take on a characteristic "cuboid" language, with levels attempting to feel "fuller" by stacking several optical illusions to give the impression that there's a slope or ramp.
Also I get grumpy and mad that I didn't start writing sooner.
Chapter 5 is a rather admittedly incoherent diatribe about the game's seperation between online and offline maps, and the infamously cobbled netcode.
If you listen closely, you can hear my whistle register at full speed!
2.0 and 2.1 were infamously marred by some rather dodgy ways of handling lag, which made playing with anyone who wasn't from North America a total chore.
You see this video? This here is a unintentional time capsule of the lag. Those random pauses and freezes? That was common all the time. We kind of just... tolerated it.
Brazil servers were particularly infamous for pushing the poorly made netcode to its limit.
This is in thanks due to the abominable ISPs most Brazillians are forced to deal with, and the gargantuan distance between someone from Canada and Brazil.
Anyone who was Brazillian had to deal with the popular servers not wanting to play with them due to causing total ping chaos.
This unintentionally resulted in a culture of segregation, where Brazillian players (SRB2 is popular in LATAM circles) couldn't play with American players and vice versa: leading to the two never wanting to interact out of causing trouble with forces out of their control, with Brazil being a slur for "bad internet".
It even made its way into SRB2Kart when your internet gets bad!
...Maybe we have some things to work out.
Chapter 6 is a recount of something particularly strange. In a age of SRB2 supporting all sorts of colours, it's hard to imagine that there was once a time where the range of colours available was actually quite limited. For a long time, Black wasn't available as a color: from the 2.0 era until the release of 2.1, it was removed from the game. While even now my memory is quite hazy on the whys and hows, I heard that the reason is because the dev team didn't want people camouflaging in Rings Linger by using certain colors, and railroaded the choices to curb this supposed flaw. This sent a shockwave of effects to the community, who were stuck with Purple Shadow or Shadow mods that had the black baked into his sprites.
I really wanted to be Black in SRB2, but I couldn't get the color, so I settled for White instead.
I mentioned that after the colors were put in the game, I settled for the Ruby color and "anime girls". Allow me to elaborate: during 2020, there was a meme about the abundance of anime characters on SRB2Kart, so for the hell of it I chose Luluco throughout my gaming sessions and since then she's become my main. The wonders of not elaborating!
Chapter 7 is the final one, and by far one that I feel the most emotional for. It's a writeup about the then-bustling roleplaying scene of the game, how it was initially repressed, and how many people made custom content for it. As a kid I used to join these servers all the time: I didn't have much to do after playing yet another round of "Coop Shenanigans" by Yacker (a old SRB2 player, I don't even know if he plays anymore), so I burned some time playing with the other kids shooting the shit and pretending to have fun and having fun by pretending to have fun. That... came out weird. Anyhow, roleplaying was once a huge facet of the SRB2 experience: before social media, people just acted out their ideas in servers while acting out big scenarios. Sometimes these got... well, fucked up, and there are things I decidedly don't want to remember despite having night terrors of such sessions.
One guy that stuck out to me however was a guy who went by "Ninten". He often roleplayed as the MOTHER character of the same name often to every single bit: even when he left games, he signed off with "Sorry, my mom's made me prime ribs." or something similar. He really, really got into his role. Initially, I was annoyed by him, but after he left one day I never saw him again and, well, not gonna lie, I kind of miss him. Whereever you are Ninten, kudos to the great effort you put to the servers and I wish you the best on your endeavors.
The chapter ends on a rather forlorn, somber note as I reflect on how most of the scene has died out with everyone growing up to do different things and how most of the material created have either gone lost to time, or have become total liminal spaces (a term that didn't really exist at the time I wrote the anecdote) that give me the damn monster willies. The reason SRB2 RP communities died out is fairly simple: social media became more and more popular and there was no real reason to limit yourself to just SRB2 anymore.
This is the culmination of 10 years' worth of experience, and... honestly I'm not sure what to do with this information. Even to this day, it's hard to process that I'm practically a oldbie compared to most people in the server. It almost feels alien hearing about people talking about how they got into the game as far back as 2019, and I'm like "I've been playing since 2013..." and it dawns on me every time. (Also jesus, has it been 9 years since the Megaman Race happened? That was a little game where people tried racing through SRB1 Remake as Megaman and everyone kept killing each other. Fun.)
All I can say for you guys is cherish your experiences, write down what stuck out to you that one day, and always take what you have for granted: because some day, actually reliving those days can be a chore upon itself.
Okay, ramble over. What do you guys remember when you first played SRB2?
Anyways, hi! My name's Chimes. I'm a fan of the Sonic games, and have been playing them for all my life.
I'm also a geriatric player of Sonic Robo Blast 2.
I know that sounds weird to any outsider but bare with me, there's a reason why I elaborate this.
If you've ever trainspotted fangames, you've for sure known about SRB2's ridiculously long development history.
In fact, Sonic Robo Blast 2 is so old that most people who've played it are younger than the game itself.
During that... time abyss, various communities and cultures have sprung around the game's online multiplayer and around the world.
Some have lasted for a long time, others barely get remembered except by a random twenty something going through their memories while in the shower.
In that time, there was a great wealth of knowledge and culture shifts that kind of got muddled or lost to time as the game got older and bigger.
I... much to my head's chagrin, was around to see many of these shifts.
At the ripe age of... holy christ, 9 years old, I first played in Summer 2013, which puts me around the range of late May - August. Initially I thought I played in November, but the timeline didn't add up and contemporary evidence shows that I was playing for quite a while, with hazy memories of having to upgrade to 2.0.7 on my potato Windows Vista tower after my first few Multiplayer games. I used to go by the name "Bun", "Dumi", "Guest135", and at one point "Jade Reuben". I am so sorry to those who got subject to me as a total menace. Whoof.
Anyways, I've been playing for a stupidly long time, and in that time, I more or less saw a game turn from a Sonic fandom curiosity, into this hulking beanstalk of a internet cornerstone that has attracted people of all ages: there's literally a generation gap of SRB2 players for every 5 years that pass. And as I got older, I began to realize: hey, no one's really talking about the stuff I've seen. Why not talk about the stuff that isn't really around anymore and what's changed?
So starting in 2021, I shared a ton of anecdotes, and wrote what can be classified as a gonzo journalist piece about my experiences with the game's community on the official SRB2 server, which I later compiled to a deep web Google Docs document: "The Ramblings Of A Grizzled Sonic Fangame Community Veteran".
Looking back at it now, ehhhhh the prose has aged like milk, I shouldn't have abused profanity since it made it hard to absorb the information at a gleam, there were some pretty questionable comparisons, but there really wasn't much like it outside of Kart Krew's very own history text nudged inside SRB2 Kart's files.
I was initially hesitant to release it out in the open, and only shared it with those in the know / my close friends' DMs to give context when I was talking about the SRB2 community, mainly due to the fear that what I was talking about might alienate those who were there, but as the years passed I realized that most people who actually would know what I'm talking about are in their mid to late twenties/thirties and probably have kids by this point: they probably have bigger things to worry about than some guy recounting a ephemeral period of niche internet history.
Plus, Sarah Z has talked about similar niche Tumblr history and has noted in her video essays that it was simply the culture of the time. I feel something similar applies here: I was a total dumb kid back then, but it really was the culture of the time and I didn't really know any better.
With that being said, it is with honor (read: OH MY GOD THIS IS SO OLD) that I publish here a record of things that happened quite some time ago, The Ramblings Of A Grizzled Sonic Fangame Community Veteran. (Boy, that name sucks.)
The Ramblings Of A Grizzled Sonic Fangame Community Veteran
docs.google.com
Also, if you see something like "Climax Age" or "Redefining Age", those were my terms for the late 2.0 era and 1.09 era respectively. I tried doing a thing where I tried classifying periods... it didn't catch on. Sorry for the confusion!
Here's a overview of each chapter.
Chapter 1 starts with a brief, yet loaded grievance about the original state of the community's moderation and its initial closed nature, unfriendly to those who were just getting in. During that time, social media as we know it didn't exist yet, so most communication began with the game itself and occasionally online venues like this very forum and #srb2fun from IRC.
Chapter 2 is a account of the noticeable lack of any proper, accessable tools for modifying the game, and how the levels reflected this. Zone Builder's sole existence owes itself to solving a problem that went unsolved for years. Anyone who were willing to make any maps of any kind had to know computer science, industrial drafting, and architecture beforehand. Because of this, most maps in the 2.0 era were structurally protrusive, and never had any loops or slopes to speak of. The reason becomes more apparent as you read on...
(Side note: I don't know why I said Art Deco, when it actually has more in common with the Brutalism movement. But linking architectural styles to a Sonic fangame community struggling with crap tools is... a choice, so let's keep going with that.)
Chapter 3 is a writeup on the rather cumbersome way mods used to be available, with the game not letting you download anything that was "too big".
In that period, files being incredibly hard to acquire was a very common problem, taking place in a culture where self-hosting just wasn't there yet.
4shared being a sign-up service was a daunting barrier because emails were... let's face it, they kinda stunk at the time, especially for verification.
I had to rely on a back alley method of downloading these files using a website that doesn't exist anymore.
I made note of a very intriguing divide that no one really spoke of: the files people played and what was actually promoted on the SRB2MB were vastly different.
Part of this was in part homebrewing of custom material people made, but part of it was also the restrictive regime the community operated under during most of the 2010s, with popular WADs like House22 being paradoxically popular yet hard to acquire.
There was a vetoing process all files in the forums underwent, which was very strict. It was survivorship bias at its meanest. What's on the MB didn't reflect what was actually being played at the time: sure, people played Tortured Planet, but they also played House23 and TheFinalSonicTeam.
Chapter 4 further builds on what Chapter 3 left with a emphasis on the then-prevalent elitism that in many ways shaped the game's community and development, with creative stagnation and a unhealthy moderation team being a prominent element.
One thing that was very common was the idolization of certain players. I don't know if it's still common - gosh, I haven't really gotten knee deep in SRB2 culture in about two years by now, - but players like ThatSRB2Dude often were swarmed and hawked by players because of their skill and were often used as comparison, and with a small world of people coming across each other, this often turned pretty nasty.
The grumpy development leadership also stagnated creative development, with experimental slopes not being put in the game for years due to doubt.
This caused the aforementioned level design to take on a characteristic "cuboid" language, with levels attempting to feel "fuller" by stacking several optical illusions to give the impression that there's a slope or ramp.
Also I get grumpy and mad that I didn't start writing sooner.
Chapter 5 is a rather admittedly incoherent diatribe about the game's seperation between online and offline maps, and the infamously cobbled netcode.
If you listen closely, you can hear my whistle register at full speed!
2.0 and 2.1 were infamously marred by some rather dodgy ways of handling lag, which made playing with anyone who wasn't from North America a total chore.
You see this video? This here is a unintentional time capsule of the lag. Those random pauses and freezes? That was common all the time. We kind of just... tolerated it.
Brazil servers were particularly infamous for pushing the poorly made netcode to its limit.
This is in thanks due to the abominable ISPs most Brazillians are forced to deal with, and the gargantuan distance between someone from Canada and Brazil.
Anyone who was Brazillian had to deal with the popular servers not wanting to play with them due to causing total ping chaos.
This unintentionally resulted in a culture of segregation, where Brazillian players (SRB2 is popular in LATAM circles) couldn't play with American players and vice versa: leading to the two never wanting to interact out of causing trouble with forces out of their control, with Brazil being a slur for "bad internet".
It even made its way into SRB2Kart when your internet gets bad!
...Maybe we have some things to work out.
Chapter 6 is a recount of something particularly strange. In a age of SRB2 supporting all sorts of colours, it's hard to imagine that there was once a time where the range of colours available was actually quite limited. For a long time, Black wasn't available as a color: from the 2.0 era until the release of 2.1, it was removed from the game. While even now my memory is quite hazy on the whys and hows, I heard that the reason is because the dev team didn't want people camouflaging in Rings Linger by using certain colors, and railroaded the choices to curb this supposed flaw. This sent a shockwave of effects to the community, who were stuck with Purple Shadow or Shadow mods that had the black baked into his sprites.
I really wanted to be Black in SRB2, but I couldn't get the color, so I settled for White instead.
I mentioned that after the colors were put in the game, I settled for the Ruby color and "anime girls". Allow me to elaborate: during 2020, there was a meme about the abundance of anime characters on SRB2Kart, so for the hell of it I chose Luluco throughout my gaming sessions and since then she's become my main. The wonders of not elaborating!
Chapter 7 is the final one, and by far one that I feel the most emotional for. It's a writeup about the then-bustling roleplaying scene of the game, how it was initially repressed, and how many people made custom content for it. As a kid I used to join these servers all the time: I didn't have much to do after playing yet another round of "Coop Shenanigans" by Yacker (a old SRB2 player, I don't even know if he plays anymore), so I burned some time playing with the other kids shooting the shit and pretending to have fun and having fun by pretending to have fun. That... came out weird. Anyhow, roleplaying was once a huge facet of the SRB2 experience: before social media, people just acted out their ideas in servers while acting out big scenarios. Sometimes these got... well, fucked up, and there are things I decidedly don't want to remember despite having night terrors of such sessions.
One guy that stuck out to me however was a guy who went by "Ninten". He often roleplayed as the MOTHER character of the same name often to every single bit: even when he left games, he signed off with "Sorry, my mom's made me prime ribs." or something similar. He really, really got into his role. Initially, I was annoyed by him, but after he left one day I never saw him again and, well, not gonna lie, I kind of miss him. Whereever you are Ninten, kudos to the great effort you put to the servers and I wish you the best on your endeavors.
The chapter ends on a rather forlorn, somber note as I reflect on how most of the scene has died out with everyone growing up to do different things and how most of the material created have either gone lost to time, or have become total liminal spaces (a term that didn't really exist at the time I wrote the anecdote) that give me the damn monster willies. The reason SRB2 RP communities died out is fairly simple: social media became more and more popular and there was no real reason to limit yourself to just SRB2 anymore.
This is the culmination of 10 years' worth of experience, and... honestly I'm not sure what to do with this information. Even to this day, it's hard to process that I'm practically a oldbie compared to most people in the server. It almost feels alien hearing about people talking about how they got into the game as far back as 2019, and I'm like "I've been playing since 2013..." and it dawns on me every time. (Also jesus, has it been 9 years since the Megaman Race happened? That was a little game where people tried racing through SRB1 Remake as Megaman and everyone kept killing each other. Fun.)
All I can say for you guys is cherish your experiences, write down what stuck out to you that one day, and always take what you have for granted: because some day, actually reliving those days can be a chore upon itself.
Okay, ramble over. What do you guys remember when you first played SRB2?