Secrets of Sonic Team
Year: 2000-2006
Date of Archival: May 27, 2021
Run by: Rian
Originally hosted at: sost.emulationzone.org
Status: Complete
Archive Link: Here
When I first decided to archive things following Zarathustra, one of the websites that came to mind was Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta page. Back in the day, Simon Wai's Sonic 2 Beta felt like the biggest find in the history of gaming. There was already a small but dedicated group of Sonic fans looking for magazine scans and lost interviews so we could piece together the story of what was known to be a tumultuous development cycle for an iconic game. Hacking the Sonic 2 ROM with a hex editor and finding Hidden Palace Zone only stoked those fires more. The Sonic 2 Beta released by Simon Wai turned the spark into a wildfire.
I was not able to find a version of Simon Wai's original site that I'd consider fit to archive. Instead, I looked towards other Sonic sites of my youth, and that's when I found that Secrets of Sonic Team had been cleaned up slightly by the emulationzone staff following a malware attack and were keeping the site in stasis. I wanted to do something similar, just in case.
Before wikis and confusing Discords and impersonal pages packed with data, there were websites run by people with names, avatars, and style. You could get lost on a site like Secrets of Sonic Team, and I did - especially in late middle school when I should have definitely been paying attention in homeroom. Just like so many others, I was intrigued by the possibilities the Simon Wai beta gave to us. I learned how to emulate bootlegs and prototypes thanks to this huge Sonic prototyping scene. And the coolest thing about SOST was that it was a spiritual successor to another site I absolutely loved, Secrets Of Sonic the Hedgehog! That site, ran by Andre Dirk, was the best Sonic website around in my eyes, and I found it through the legendary Sonic Stuff Research Group collection of sites. Rian had the foresight to actually back up old versions of SoStH, so this is something of a two-in-one deal!
The Sonic prototyping and archival scene is doing well. They've found prototypes and information I never would have dreamed existed when I was a kid. It's wonderful to see it thrive. But every so often I see myself drifting back to sites like this, when every scan felt like a thrilling new discovery, when as clunky as the code was it felt good to click around. And I love to go back to SoStH and remember all the fun hoaxes and Photoshops and jokes from when image manipulation was in its infancy and we were all just trying to piece together the secret history of a game franchise we all loved.
As mentioned, this website was cleaned and archived wonderfully, though being a hobbyist site on a subdomain it doesn't play well not being in a root site, so I've popped this onto its own little subdomain too. I even grabbed a few externally-hosted images and hosted them internally so they also don't break one day. This site is entirely complete, though the forums have long since gone offline. As they use an older version of phpBB, I chose not to search for or restore them, so the link will just lead back here.
This site wouldn't be able to be mirrored without the great work from those who came before me in 2011, so I offer a big shoutout to them. Check this one out, and check out SoStH, too. There's all kinds of treasure to uncover here.