And that Ladies and Gentlemen was Summer Of Sonic 2010. Over, done with and out. What I’m going to suggest to everyone in terms of the main staff is that they when they have the chance write down an overview of the event from their own perspective. I’ve a few things to address, many of you are probably wondering “FOR THE LOVE OF TIKAL AAUK, wtf are you doing even up right now?” All I can say is I actually got up at 8am – I have things to do. Perhaps we can say that my biggest achievement at SOS 10 was to actually make it home, make myself a drink, sit down and watch TV for a good half hour before taking myself to bed. Not having Echo Hawk having to physically drag me in a state of delerium up a flight of stairs like last year.
Discoponies just collared me on msn funnily enough about
this.
“I’m glad this year u seemed to think about ur own well
being too. U seemed less prone to a stroke.”
“You missed some s***.”
“Oh god.”
Firstly thanks to all the staff, too many to name here, for their hard work and their dedication to the cause. Whether you enjoyed the heck out of Summer of Sonic 2010 (the majority) or thought it was really boring and run by “nerds with egos” (Christ, what else do we have to put on to make you lot not “bored”?!?) the team worked like Trojans under some very difficult circumstances which I’ll get into in a sec. Anyone who thinks “oh its been organised really poorly” doesn’t know the whole story.
We actually had an absolute nightmare with the setup, as all of us arrived Friday to find that the venue had very kindly not yet been cleared out of all the other furniture which rather prevented us from doing much for many hours. Amazingly we did actually manage to get everything up and working, the net was a bit fragile but working, we had all the audio and video ready and set up, the furniture was in place, C40 had done their mini-rehersal and we left late on Friday night with myself, Blake, Echo and bmn being the last to go, ready to finalise making things pretty in the morning due to the lack of time for it with the clean out leaving venue staff to finalise the tidying.
When we came back in the morning… our tech kit was gone. The laptops, and HD camera which were left in the “secured” venue and belonging to Rory/Roareye had vanished without a trace. You can imagine how we felt at this point; Rory despite being devastated insisted the most important thing was we somehow got everything set up again. And it’s that kind of attitude that shows you what a cool guy he is – caring more about the greater good of the con. So how Ian/bmn, Jay/Discoponies (who created all the snazzy video idents and things) and a couple of others somehow managed to get things set up again with a borrowed computer that was frankly rubbish in the time we had I have no idea. Because of all this we didn’t have the opportunity to make the venue as pretty as we’d’ve liked. I had some awesome ASR wall banners that never saw the light of day and a bunch of posters that should’ve been out and around.
Speaking of The Pavilion itself…don’t get me started on air-con situation and trust me we were just as hot.
Regarding Sonic 4 and Colours – unfortunately those were all the machines we could get, S4 and Colours Wii were on special machines and those were all that were available, the fact that the sync button on the Wii apparently was broken facilitating an emergency Gamecube controller backup didn’t help matters but the vast majority of people I think that played it really enjoyed the experience.
So perhaps we can say that SOS was a triumph in the face of some
extreme advercity? For Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode I there was
certainly a BIG reaction to it, and hey that was the E3 build so
didn’t have the tweaks done to it. People were really
enjoying Colours, the shop did a very steady turn over – and
if you think I see a penny of that boy are you wrong! The art
corner was VERY busy as before, lots of the more serious artists
were very interested indeed in Nigel Dobbyn’s clinics. The
cosplay was off the hook this year, how many people did we
have in the end? 20-ish? Who’d’ve thought Shadow would
be the most cosplayed character?! And can people now drop last
years “you don’t know who Purge is” nonsense on
the basis I twigged Sketch Turner and Roadkill before you.
Incidentally there was an additional prize to
that which I shall have to get to the devious Dr. Eggman.
I think I won the battle of the t-shirts this year, though only because no one saw Jay’s sparkly Tails sprite t-shirt until the end.
The Tails Doll made a spectacular return of course, Vger/Wentos was surprised with his forfeit, the Buzzbombers quiz proved very entertaining: if proving that T-Bird and Dreadknux are dirty liars and that Johnny Gioeli doesn’t know as much about Jun Senoue as he should. The Wrecks Factor Live had some rather rousing performances, including Mini-T surprising everybody with a heck of a performance of the Sonic Underground theme. An All-Stars Racing World Champion was crowned and people enjoyed playing 8 player networked games, Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic Heroes, Sonic Unleashed and just generally interacting with other Sonic fans.
Okay, so the hermit crabs went up the spout. Yeah, considering
how much effort it took to actually get hold of those my heartfelt
thanks to you all for promptly nicking them all.
Oh yes, and HELLO – we had CRUSH FRIGGIN’
40? Jun and Johnny had a superb Q&A hosted by T-Bird,
which was actually very revealing. Jun treated everyone to some
“Afternoon Tea”, a 20 minute individual set with the
surprise addition of Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Japan Trip competition
entrants Freya and The Divas singing Escape From The City before
C40 TORE DOWN THE HOUSE with their set. Gotta say, as being partly
responsible for writing that set it sounded great. I say sounded as
I never got to see it. *Sob* Hey, someone had to start de-rigging
everything. So where’s the YouTube videos guys? Some of us
want to see. 
More individual stories from the event to follow, including a video from Frobman we were not able to show due to the kit theft – we’ll let you know more on what happens with that. In the future I’ll also be asking you guys what you want for Summer of Sonic 2011 – yes, 2011. As if you missed myself and Svend’s last announcement its going to be held on the first Saturday after Sonic’s 20th Birthday on June 25th 2011! Have a think of what you might want, keep an eye out for the post then when we ask tell us what you’re after (besides the obvious… bigger, cooler, refreshments) that’ll go up Monday I think.
For now… I’m off to have a lie down and rest the laundry list of injuries I picked up.
Tags: Sonic Wrecks
I think summer of sonic 2010 was quite good & there was alot to look forword to that’s without a doubt but at the same time there were some things that didn’t exactly pan out as much as it could of done and i know alot of them have been said already but it would be better if i give reasons to justify what i felt went wrong then to just pointlessly say two words then be on my way.
1st off:The queuing,ok i can understand that this is a big event so sometimes things get delayed but like others have said the people who got there early with tickets should have more priority as it’s been stated those without tickets would have to wait for a hour but instead we got send in at the same time & the queues for the games was offputting to say the least so because of that i missed out on signings,getting a personised drawing etc and ultimately wasn’t worth the wait.
2:The merch now i know Nemain has covered this but i felt there could have been more of a range of items & quantity for that matter.Ok some of the items were reasonably priced & others were not but mainly because most of the merch was snapped up straight away i was unable to get anything of my lil bro let alone myslef.
3:The air con really you should have cheaked this when you were looking at the pavillon and needless to say if you say a place can hold up to 1000 people,8/10 times that number will most likey be met however the venue itslef wasn’t bad but if you do go with somewhere else try to avoid middle of nowhere/back streets(like 09) places i’m just saying.
4:Audience participation yes there was quite alot so not much of a complaint but i think there could be alil more involvement such as finding new ways to get the fans to interact with each other,try hide some gold rings in less likey places/give more of a chance to get gold rings etc (i say drop the whole crab thing as like you said most of them were taking anyway & i still am unsure what you were meant to do with them).
I think there’s a couple of other things but i’m going to leave it for now as this is starting to sound like a rant and i’m not trying to annoy anyone or start anything but i understand there’s always going to be some mishap like the getting the venue ready,powercuts,delays,equipment failure ie the speaker(Dread & Aauk know what i’m talking about) and of course rory’s stuff being stolen but in all honesty no matter how “secure/safe” a place is meant to be it’s better to keep it close at hand but i digress feel free to comment on what i’ve written.
@Hood
The people who had tickets were given priority. I’ve lost count how many times this has been said by both ticket and non ticket holders, those who did not have tickets were not allowed in before everyone else… There was one guy by me who was asked to show his ticket, he didn’t have one so was sent to the back of the line! How much more priority can you get?
The merch was priced amazingly fairy, often I couldn’t believe the deals on offer, I managed to get a mint condition STC issue 178 with the free gifts for £4 which was aparently the most expensive STC there, that should have gone for nearly 4 times that price if they really wanted to price it right. The plushies were priced exactly right and the Japanese stuff was again very cheap for what it was and what you could have paid.
@Hood
The people who had tickets were given priority. I’ve lost count how many times this has been said by both ticket and non ticket holders, those who did not have tickets were not allowed in before everyone else… There was one guy by me who was asked to show his ticket, he didn’t have one so was sent to the back of the line! How much more priority can you get?
The merch was priced amazingly fairy, often I couldn’t believe the deals on offer, I managed to get a mint condition STC issue 178 with the free gifts for £4 which was aparently the most expensive STC there, that should have gone for nearly 4 times that price if they really wanted to price it right. The plushies were priced exactly right and the Japanese stuff was again very cheap for what it was and what you could have paid.
@Casanova
I’m just saying what i saw & heard although i did have 2 guys in front of me who got sent back aswell but by the time we got allowed in they were in within 5 mins anyway so it doesn’t really matter
The merch however was snapped up quite quickly so i failed to see most of what was on offer & i agree that some of it was more than reasonable but others could have been a lil cheaper
so, sos 2011 is going to be in london again, right?