Last Saturday (25th June) I attended the Summer of Sonic 2011 event. It was an extra special event as Sonic, everybody's favourite hedgehog was celebrating his 20th anniversary, I can still remember when my friend first bought the game on his mega drive, scary that 20 years have passed.
After the big rivalry over the years between Sega & Sonic vs Nintendo & Mario, it seemed strange that the first thing I saw when entering the sauna, sorry The Camden Center (it was very Hot) was a collection of gamers playing Sonic the hedgehog on the Nintendo Wii. Even stranger going into the main hall where again lots of people playing and waiting patiently to play Sonic, this time on the Xbox. I didn't see if there were any old Sega consoles playing Sonic, personally I would of loved to see some Megadrives with the original cartridges.
There were so many superfans of Sonic there, some going great lengths to create outfits and dress up as characters from the game, strangely enough for the time I was there there were not many people dressed up as Sonic, there were a few dressed up as Knuckles, a couple of Shadow Sonic, Tails and many Dr Robotnik/Dr Eggman.
I know Sonic was a favourite among gamers, but I was surprised at how busy the event was, as you can see at the bottom from the photos the amount of people that were still queueing to get into the event, and the queues were not going down they just seemd to be growing, as I left the had started queuing round the corner.
At the event there was Takashi Iizuka and Yuji Naka who had a couple of slots during the day to answer questions that people had about Sonic and the history of the game. There was also Jen Senoue who was signing a many number of autographs and was happy to have his picture taken with all the fans that queued up, you can see yours truly with him at the bottom. There was also lots of competitions where people could try to win some swag by performing in the Sonic Karoke, I know one person managed to win a PS3, as well as many other prizes.
As always I am always interested in your thoughts so if you have any comments or feedback then please feel free to add any comments, or you can mail me here.
