Once upon a time, there was a man named the Rat King. He lived in the sewers of New York City, and was able to control the rat population with a simple tune. His private existence was disturbed when he was forced to go head to head with four mutant turtles, who also happened to be teenagers.
...oh wait, sorry, I’ve gotten my rat men mixed up. Let’s try this again.
Ratman (aka Paul) was the owner and administrator of rat.org, an early fandom-based website on the Internet. There were a number of sections that reflected his various interests - Mortal Kombat, Gargoyles, Furry artwork - but one of the biggest was an archive dedicated to Sonic the Hedgehog. It contained a number of resources, accessible through either a handy FTP client, or through the World Wide Web. Images, sound files, incredibly compressed video - it had it all. Also being host to one of the earliest mailing lists dedicated to the blue blur, the site became one of the main building blocks for the Sonic Internet community.
Having started in 1995, the archive’s main focus was on the Saturday morning cast and related Archie comic book. As the site was in english, and based in the United States, the canon featuring the Freedom Fighters was the most prolific at the time. There was lip service for the games, and a handful of scans from the Fleetway series published in the U.K., but the world of “SatAM” dominated the site. After all, it was the cartoon that made Ratman a fan of the franchise in the first place, and the site was technically a personal one.
After the cancellation of the animated series, however, Ratman’s interest in the series waned. On June 6th, 1996, he closed the mailing list. The following year, he removed the Sonic section from his website altogether. A few months later, he would refuse nearly all Sonic the Hedgehog submissions to his furry art archive. The removal of his “Sonic resource page” came with little warning, with people scrambling to save its contents for their own use. A complete backup was made by Paul Lapenese, who gave it to David Gonterman, housing it on his Foxfire Studios Simplenet site. Gonterman tried to expand on the archive by adding a slew of new content, but it soon closed down for reasons best left to explain elsewhere...
When Ratman shut down the site and stepped away from Sonic fandom, the Sonic Internet community was in a slight panic, one of their cornerstones erased in the blink of an eye. However, at that point, rat.org was hardly the only game in town. Other Sonic sites had sprung up during the two years it was in operation, full of copied and original content. Sonic fans simply moved on to other places to talk, other sites to download fanfiction and cropped official art. Even still, for years, there was a legendary aura around the complete rat.org archive, especially as it became harder to come across.
Eventually, Ratman ceased operating his entire website, leaving only a splash page to hold onto the domain. In July of 2009, Ratman quietly reuploaded the archive, hidden at its original address of rat.org/sonic. Eventually, he relinked it on his front page, and when he recently moved to kilorat, he continued to host his own backup.
Looking at the contents now, they may not seem like that big of a deal. Any site dedicated to talking about Sonic the Hedgehog will have content a thousandfold more detailed than what existed on rat.org. But to fully appreciate what can be found below, you have to rewind back to a time when the Internet was a smaller, slower locale. Where images were sparse, and compressed Realplayer files would take hours to finish downloading. In a word where a harddrive having a single gig of space was a luxury, the Sonic content on rat.org was impressive.
These outdated files are a historical document, a window into a more innocent time. But as much as things change, they also stay the same, with arguments over Sonic canon and flourishes of drama. A familiar, if forgotten, realm of Sonic fandom history.