Inside the 2013 Sonic Generations of Skate Event

The following is a report sent to us by SonicRadio.Net admins Shayne and Charles Edwards, who were both in attendance at this year’s Sonic Generations of Skate Presented by Sonic Lost World.  Sonic Radio is a TSSZ affiliate.

*****

Sonic and Shadow Remix recently attended the Sonic Generations of Skate event down at the Clash at Clairemont 7 in San Diego on June 1st, and both of them share their experience and thoughts on what could of been a great promotion opportunity into a big disappointment.

These were Shadow Remix’s thoughts on the matter:

Come on guys let’s come up with an idea for Sonic Generations of Skate this year!

How about…

Sega’s Generations of FAIL presented by a game that we were supposed to promote at this event!

Yeah, that works perfectly!

To be quite blunt that’s EXACTLY how I can describe the some three to four hours of my sunburned attendance at this so called “Sonic Generations of Skate presented by Sonic Lost World.” You couldn’t even call this an event!

I showed up somewhere just after eleven in the morning to pay $20 to get in with Sonic Remix and received a small yellow bag with a small poster, a couple of stickers, other skating promos, and a card for how the events were laid out. It wasn’t anything big, but hey there might be a Sega booth inside to collect some sort of goodies like I was told about last time right? Right? Maybe?

Nope…

There wasn’t a single booth anywhere in the general admission area, and since we couldn’t get into the VIP area we couldn’t tell if there was one there either. Sure there were booths for skateboards, trucks, wheels, food, music, etc. but there was no sign of Sega at this event at all.

In fact I saw absolutely NOTHING from Sega with the exception of three logos on posters in multiple places along with other promoting companies, and the logos plastered on the half-pipe itself. The only other real indications that Sega was anywhere in this event AT ALL was the fact that the Sonic mascot had come out (and even then he only went into the VIP area, and on the half-pipe with all of the competitors), Aaron leading Sonic out into the VIP area (and it wasn’t long before I noticed that he had disappeared), and Kelly.

If you think I’m kidding… yeah… I’m not.

To me there seemed to be A LOT of fans who only got in on general admission that would’ve loved to take a picture with our blue hero (Not that I care, I already took care of that last year, and years ago in Japan), but couldn’t since he didn’t go out there the entire time I was out in the crowd. Even something as small as that can boost the crowd’s morale, but chalk it up for another bad decision to keep that to VIP’s.

Now if he went out there after the Skate event then I didn’t know about it since I decided it was a waste of my time being there.

The only thing that kept any of my interest in being at this event were the skaters on the half-pipe for the competition itself: Tony Hawk, Lincoln Ueda, Andy MacDonald, Mitchie Brusco, Mike McGill, Paul-Luc Ronchetti, Pierre Luc Gagnon, and so on and so forth. These people were the one’s that kept the crowd’s interest.

Oh, and before I forget the score board they used for the event looked well made and seemed like it would be easy for one person to keep track of who was winning so far. Um, right… let’s run with that thought. Let’s run with the fact that they couldn’t get scores up there in the right places since they changed them on us twice. We’ll also point out that by the time the whole competition was done and over with we didn’t even know who was in the lead or who had won for that matter. Yup, smooth move ex lax.

YOU HAD ONE JOB!

Granted I will state that yes I do believe Sega coming up with the idea of teaming people up from the first, second, and third generations of skateboarders was a BRILLIANT idea for a publicity stunt back in 2011. Yes, I do believe this should continue because it shows that skaters young and old can come together and thoroughly enjoy themselves, because it sure as hell looked like they did!

What I don’t agree is on the fact that they promoted: Sonic Generations of Skate Presented by Sonic Lost World… and they didn’t have a proper presence there! Sure… set up a booth, use the same footage we’ve already seen if you have to do so, sell something from the Sonic Universe to bring in revenue or at least help out with the charitable contributions that this event was originally intended for, and answer a few questions. How hard is that?

All in all…

… Sonic Boom 2012 was a thousand times better than this, and even that event in and of itself didn’t get a lot of recognition since people immediately thought it was a copycat attempt of Summer of Sonic.

Sonic Remix also shares her thoughts on the matter:

What Shadow Remix said pretty much summed up my thoughts for the event, but because I was the one who attended the Sonic Generations of Skate in Venice Beach in 2011, I can add some comparisons between the two events.

First off, while the Sonic Generations of Skate in Venice Beach was more fronted by SEGA, the Sonic Generations of Skate in Clairemont was an event INSIDE of the Clash at Clairemont 7. So you had more sponsors and more vendors, and less of SEGA themselves. Unlike the first time, SEGA had no booth setup for ANYTHING, not even so much as a video kiosk showing off the Sonic Lost World game that the Sonic Generations of Skate was supposed to be presented by. At least when they did it in 2011, they had a number of game kiosks setup so people could play the demo of Sonic Generations.

Because this event was taking place at the Mission Valley YMCA Family Skatepark, the event was SMALLER and tightly packed. I could barely move ANYWHERE, and many places began to bottleneck. Venice Beach was open, set up on basketball courts near the beach, so it was easy to move and get a good spot to watch the event. In Clairemont, the best spot I got was over near the VIP entrance (and thus, making me look like some stalker when I flagged down people from SEGA who walked near the area), probably because we were right next to a food tent and the people were very nice to let us sit on their HUGE cooler and rest our feet, while anyone who was NOT in the VIP area had nowhere to sit for the event. Venice Beach had bleachers. BLEACHERS!

As for the event itself, it certainly felt like a repeat of Venice Beach, only it felt less fun for some reason. Not because of the lack of SEGA’s presence, but probably because I felt claustrophobic being in a much more tightly packed crowd trying to watch Tony Hawk and others perform. During Venice Beach, I had plenty of opportunities to walk away from the event during the breaks and check out the area that had plenty of shops, getting space, food, and actual bathrooms. (And pester Aaron with idle chatter at the SEGA booths) Heck, there were vendors that were selling those giant gems that looked like Chaos Emeralds. The Clairemont event was at a skate park in the middle of a residential area and a small school and community park nearby with like 2 food tents and port-a-potties, but absolutely nowhere worth trying to navigate through the tight crowd away from the event (and lose my cooler seat in the process). That scoreboard that Shadow mentioned earlier? I’m pretty sure it was recycled from last year, only paper was plastered over names that were replaced and a magic marker used to fill in the new names.

As Shadow mentioned before, this was a wasted promotional opportunity, announced WAY LATE (Yea, let’s tell people about the event two days before it actually happens). I liked the original event, and enjoyed watching the famous skateboarders in action. But in a tightly packed crowd where I could barely see the action and actually had more interest in chatting with other people, Sonic Generations of Skate could do well to set up more like how it was done in 2011: A stand-alone event in a much more open and interesting location like Venice Beach. I don’t mind paying the 20 dollars donation to attend a charitable event, but Clairemont was too small a place to be setting up such an event.