Since this is the first time I’ll write a blog for the site (although it may be the last after the site editor sees it), I thought I’d talk about my first experiences with Sonic.

The first time I saw Sonic, I was about 14 years old, and out shopping at the Belfry Shopping Centre in Redhill. Dixons (an electrical store at the time) had a display unit in the front of their shop, with three small monitor screens showing off the rolling demo video from the first Mega Drive game. I was fascinated by the speed of the character doing loop after loop through a landscape with more colours than I’d seen before in a videogame. Actually, I lie, I’d seen more colours on a ZX Spectrum loading screen, but I guess that doesn’t really count.

I remember wondering whether the actual game would look that good. It turned out it did, but I’ve certainly found myself wondering that a lot when I see game trailers these days. I picked up the controller but it wasn’t plugged in. It was about six months before I got to play it properly.

I wasn’t that poor but didn’t get a chance to buy too many games, so I needed to play them a lot to get enough value out of each. I must have clocked up at least 100 hours on the first Sonic game, and then at least that much on Sonic 2. I think most of the time I spent on the latter was in trying to pull off the Super Sonic cheat, though, as I have big fat fingers.

I first started at SEGA in 2003, reasonably close to the relaunch of the company as a software-only publisher. I now manage the PR for SEGA’s games in the UK’s gaming press. What that means, in a nutshell, is that I promote the company’s games and help to build pre-awareness for each launch. Sonic’s a big part of that.

And right now, of course, it’s all about Sonic and the Secret Rings. More on that in my next post…

Stefan - UK PR Manager