Nobody remembers The Perfect Chaos Gang. Well, almost no one. If you’ve never heard of it, I don’t expect this page to be of any interest. For the handful that do recall the name, and feel the urge to fall down a hole of uncomfortable nostalgia, strap in.
Back in 1998, a man named Andre Dirk gained a bit of notoriety when he uploaded a handful of photographs featuring an early build of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that he owned. Pointing his camera at a tv, he snapped them, developed them, scanned them, and then told everyone what he had. Those who were part of the Sonic Internet community took notice, traffic flooding into his small FortuneCity site. Unable to handle the influx, the site went down. Demand to see them was so high, he had no choice but to mirror them somewhere else.
Instead of just throwing them up on another free hosting service, he forwarded the images to Soneec, owner of the website Sonic Pandemonium. Suddenly, her small corner of the web became known to quite a few people, which inspired the creation of a message board connected to the site. The “secrets of Sonic” was big business, and her general Sonic site was able to capitalize on the attention.
Those who began to frequent her site and post on the message board began calling themselves “The Sonic Pandemonium Gang.” The conversations were what you’d expect: Sonic talk, school talk, general goofing around. It was a small knit group, and everyone seemed to get along. Eventually, people even started writing stories about each other. They weren’t the greatest things in the world, but one has to remember: we were kids.
Yes, I was there too. Only reason why there’s an archive in the first place.
Eventually becoming “The Perfect Chaos Gang” (on account of Sonique’s website being rebranded), the group shared in the awkward years of middle and high school together. The forum, which was originally on a service called “sportsonly,” upgraded to EZboard. But with age and experience, the cracks started to show. Sonique, wanting to focus on her growing “SatAM” community, handed the message board over to one of the frequent posters there, SonKnuck. Not long after, the posts stopped coming, the stories stopped being written, and people moved on.
We were no longer children. It’s a story as old as time.
Not everyone stopped talking to each other, of course. There were plenty of people who frequented other places in the larger Sonic Internet community, such as the now-defunct Moogle Cavern. People talked on AOL Instant Messenger, and IRC. If you had made a closer friend there, people didn’t stop talking just because the community dissipated. But the way we spoke, the way we wrote? It changed and evolved, like all things. What is inside this archive does not reflect who these people are now. Heck, it hasn’t reflected them in ages.
Whatever happened to Andre Dirk? Well, he tried to sell his pirated copy of Sonic 2, but a man named Simon Wai found the ROM image on the Internet. Both those men would go on to run websites on the early Sonic Stuff Research Group, and Simon’s site would one day evolve into Sonic Retro. Before it was Retro, Simon disappeared, and Andre vanished from the scene even earlier, Secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog being an abandoned land of hoaxes and improbable theories.
This page exists as a curiosity, a reminder for those who were part of this community, and to flip through when struck with the urge to roll back into nostalgia for a moment. And who, late at night, might remember one curious question - just who baked that pie?
