heartbreaking: sonic fans used to like sonic and other people

We live in such a world that even reading peaceful and constructive opinions about the Sonic game seems strange and cursed

Look at how civilized they are! Their way of talking i-it scares me!

What I love about reading old usenet posts is that they're either extremely serious and formal or they're proto-4chan ragebait shitposts with no in-between.

What... they talk so nicely... i think we need to go back🥀

Man, the 90s were built different, people were actually human...

9:00 PLEASE know that, in '91, nobody was using the Internet except a few million nerds & well-off, tech-savvy folks. This stuff never represented the general public.
These guys had experience being ostracized & vulnerable, they were more thoughtful & awkward than the average person. They still had their problems, but Internet culture was a very distinct, safe place where no-one else was around to harsh the mellow, before the Web got flooded with 6 billion people who have nothing in common & don't care.

We also got to remember this was a time when Sonic was brand new, he wasn't around before and was slowly becoming the big title character we all know now, this was history being written in their present time. It was all new to them. Imagine when people said "That Mario guy" when he was brand new. My mom (from the 80's) still says that and it puts it into perspective. The leaps between generations, I think this video did a great job showing that.

There’s something so 90s about a guy on an early internet forum calling Sonic “one smooth character”

Please make this a series.
I'd really like to see the reaction of the old internet to the two adventures.

09:47 A buddy that's dragged on a leash? That guy predicted Knuckles' Chaotix

Dude, i think the internet in general might need a reboot, these guys are clearly way smarter than most of us here nowadays what the hell

I live for shit like this. There is something beautiful and kinda haunting reading, at this point, coming up on 40 years old

i'm ngl, seeing these type of constructive and open minded opinions on the internet feels so surreal

Sometimes I forget just how old the internet is

The before times...

The sonic 1 release date thing could be the fact stores already had the carts ready to go and started selling them early due to the fact release dates were never set in stone so they just put it on shelves

There were so few internet users in '91 that some of these predictions could have been seen by the developers and actually influenced them.

im 31 and this predates even my old ass.  forums never fail to be the internet i grew up with though,

I suspect the reason people were nicer about Sonic on early internet forums is there was no incentive for regular ordinary people to get attention and clicks in the 90s. Negativity sells, and when the internet started getting mainstreamed to the masses around the social media era suddenly everyone wanted to go "viral" and "spread their message across". That's not to say people didn't complain or toxicity was non-existent, rather, what you saw on the forums more or less represented the average Sonic consumer. And these days Sonic has a HUGE dedicated fan base, and I believe that's been conflated with the offline portion who otherwise doesn't have strong opinions one way or the other. It's sometimes easy to forget the internet isn't representative of real life, to think that our niche interests and hobbies are shared by almost everyone.

(I'm also not making a value judgement on the Sonic fandom as a whole btw; it's a general observation that the modern internet has a distortion effect on overall perception)