Happy 10th Birthday Sonic Paradox!

It has been almost a year since I joined the team here at TSSZ and already it has been a wild ride. However I will never forget the group that I call my family. A place where my journey as a news reporter began. A place where I still serve as their ambassador, even today. And that site is Sonic Paradox. It is rather fitting to think that they’re having a much bigger milestone. Today is their tenth birthday. For a full decade we have been creating Sonic fan animations. On this day ten years ago is where Sonic Paradox all began. The very first Sonic Paradox project, the Sonic Tribute Collab, was made.

But before I get to the reminiscing I’d like to touch upon an announcement that a lot of you have been anticipating: the new Sonic Paradox YouTube channel. Ever since our previous one had been hacked and the fight back had been a lost cause, we’ve been hard at work getting the new one ready while simultaneously working on our next projects. Well today I can finally announce that the gates to the brand new Sonic Paradox YouTube channel are now open, which you can find here. We’ll be doing live streams, reuploading our previous work in HD, uploading our new works, and communicating with you guys on a level we have not been able to do before.

With that said allow me to take a trip to memory lane for a while. Sonic Paradox in 2005 was a very different place. We technically weren’t known as Sonic Paradox yet, just the “Sonic Animation BBC” forum. Back then the staff was a small group of Sonic fans:

In 2005, Sweet_Kat22 was the leader of the team and the Sonic Tribute Collab had been just finished by the time the forums were made. This is where brainstorming would ensue for further projects. This included the second Tribute Collab.

As with any website things will not always go according to plan. Drama was a major player in the early Sonic Paradox and would ultimately cause things to splinter apart. The second Tribute Collab would eventually enter production hell and become abandoned. The team would become led by various faces. HyperactiveYouth, known for Sonic Uncut, led the team for a couple of months followed by Bit_Master and then eventually The Wax, the team’s current leader. Late in the year brand new forums were made and the team became Sonic Paradox. As one era ended, a new one began: The Sonic Shorts.

On October 19th, 2005 The Wax had debuted the project that inspired the infamous Sonic Shorts, the Sonic Shorts Collection. It wasn’t a project immediately considered for volumes but that would change in 2008. Recruitment commenced on DeviantArt and Newgrounds and then the day came. On February 27th, 2008 came Volume 1 of what many recognize to be the Sonic Shorts Collab.

Four volumes later and by the end of 2008 it was a whole new ballgame, all of which took place on Newgrounds. A new homepage was created, the one that has since been the main page for the team. As behind the scenes work continued things began to slow down in terms of Shorts production as effort rose along with standards and the following year came Volume 5 along with Knuckles Briefs, the latter of which debuted at the Summer of Sonic convention. We also had a Sonic Shorts preview shown off:

This was our first time being able to see how people were reacting to our work face-to-face, without a computer screen. It was also our time to branch out. People saw the faces behind the Shorts for the very first time with in interview, courtesy of Elson “Darkspeeds” Wong:

Branching out was the theme of 2009 and 2010. Volumes 5 and 6 came out in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Experimentation was also a thing we love doing if it means it turning out epic or for a laugh. Among the experiments was one by RGX: a news section for Sonic Paradox, a place to get Sonic news at for the community. At first it went off with little issue. Articles would go up without much trouble. However work commitments would arise and RGX would have to step down from the news reporting. And so he created a thread for it. Multiple people responded, including me.

At the time of that post I was 18. Now I’m 23 and my five-year anniversary with SP is in a couple of months. Back then, however, I never would’ve seen that coming. Just being accepted at the time was a shocker. But I was accepted and became their news reporter entered the Sonic Paradox staff only two weeks after joining. I’d end up covering the mayhem of Sonic 4, the optimism of Sonic Colors, and eventually the nostalgia of Sonic Generations.

While I was at work so was the rest of Sonic Paradox. That experimentation phase we were in was not done yet. In 2010 came abridged series. more specifically, Sonic F, the abridged series for Sonic X. While F may be funnier than Q the humor that the show would provide was even funnier and soon Sonic F would follow the route of The Sonic Show: becoming its own entity within Sonic Paradox itself.

Volume 7 of Sonic Shorts came about in 2011 following a very busy period for the animators. Wax had created many shorts and, at one point, contemplated a second Sonic Shorts Collection. Instead it was made into its own Shorts volume to buy time for the rest of the crew to continue working on what would be Volume 8. Around this time, to mark Sonic’s 20th anniversary, we had what would become the most ambitious project so far: Project 20. A music album, image, and more were created and they all debuted in 2011 after being in production for a year.

Another experiment followed a couple of years later, after. One thing we pondered was if the Sonic Shorts would overshadow our other projects. Sonic F and the Sonic Shorts were our only projects by 2012. But that wouldn’t stop a new arrival to the team, Recorderdude, from getting the idea for an animation musical collab based on Sonic Heroes. Seaside Denied was born and would become just as popular as the Sonic Shorts. Metropolis Mayhem followed in 2013 and was a hit too!

One thing about Summer of Sonic 2013 that I’ll never forget, other than commentating on the live feed, is knowing that we’d be dropping the bombshell of showing the crowd Sonic Shorts Volume 8 in its entirety. I recall people in the Sonic community wondering what the “secret animation” is and many speculating it as the reveal of the Sonic Boom cartoon which had yet to be seen at the time. Knowing what it was, I recall being both amusing and yet painful at the same time seeing as I wanted to reveal it so bad. Still we had never seen each other face to face. We’d fix that in 2013 with a panel at Youmacon:

Since then we’ve been at work for the next projects. And that’s the second thing I can announce. We have three upcoming projects in the works that we have been working on since the panel: SEGA Shorts, Casino Calamity, and Vector’s Knickers. The Sonic Shorts are being redone in HD for the new YouTube channel and have started going up as of this article’s publishing. Each volume will be released in HD weekly with adjustments such as making them more friendly to YouTube’s more strict copyright standards along with YouTube’s system of video playing as a whole.

It may not be much but we are working on them, rest assured! There’s a lot in store for the site and maybe, in another ten years, the trip down memory lane will continue one more. For now… Happy birthday, Sonic Paradox!

This post was originally written by the author for TSSZ News.