Blaze Hedgehog
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Blaze Hedgehog is an unemployed high-school dropout living in his mother's basement. He became a Sonic fan in Christmas 1991 after playing Sonic the Hedgehog in his brother's Sega Genesis. He joined the Sonic Internet Community sometime in 1998.
Major Accomplishments
- Sometime around 1995, at the age of 13, he contacted Sega of America with a proposal for a remote controlled Sonic toy. A month later, he received several pages of release forms from Sega, asking for the rights to the idea. Unable to understand the thick legal jargon of the documents, he was not able to determine if he would be compensated for his ideas and never signed the papers.
- On September 9th, 2000 he founded the Sonic Amateur Games Expo with the original intent gaining fan games higher profile attention (of professional gaming magazines) in order to soften the image of fan gaming among copyright owners (who can at times perceive the hobby as a form of piracy). Blaze continued to run SAGE every six months for the first two and a half years of it's existence. He has long since retired from most managerial duties required by SAGE. Though SAGE never fulfilled its original purpose, it has become a staple of the Sonic fan game community.
- Sometime in 2002, he opened SonicXtreme.tk, which was, at the time, the only site dedicated exclusively to Sonic X-treme. Shortly after first opening the site, he began attempting to track down members of Sonic X-Treme's developmental staff (one of the early cases of trying to contact the staff that worked on a Sonic game), starting with Howard Drossin. Moving down the list of the game's development staff, he eventually got in touch with Mike Wallis, the game's producer, who was working at Simon & Schuester Interactive at the time. Mike asked for a phone interview, and Blaze panicked. Two Sonic fans spoke up, requesting to do the job for Blaze: Chris_A, and Pachuka. Knowing Chris_A as a friend-of-a-friend, Blaze was inclined to choose him; but since he lived in the UK, Mike was adverse to a long-distance call. Through process of elimination, Pachuka was chosen, and on June 9th, 2002, the interview was conducted. Pachuka used this interview to gain contact info with more people of the Sonic X-Treme staff, but be chose not to share this information with Blaze (instead using it as a spring-board for his own site, Sonic CulT). As the flood of new information regarding Sonic X-Treme began, Blaze slowly stopped updating SonicXtreme.tk, as the information acquired had exhausted the website's original purpose.
- In 2005, he was published in the New Games Journalism Online Magazine, The Gamer's Quarter for his ten page article, "Dissecting a Hedgehog: An In-Depth Analysis of Sonic the Hedgehog". The article highlighted the differences in gameplay design concepts between the Sega Genesis Sonic games and the later, 3D Sonic games. It eventually made the statement that the 3D Sonic games have completely abandoned most of the concepts and the simplicity that made Sonic the Hedgehog such a unique game, such as the removal of the momentum-based physics system and the 3D Sonic game's intense focus on making Sonic run fast while neglecting other parts of the gameplay experience. The article has been republished on Blaze's DeviantArt Account, here. Blaze was offered a full-time position as a writer for The Gamer's Quarter, but turned down the opportunity, unable to guarantee he could continue to write more articles of the same length and depth on a regular basis.
- For the duration of it's short lifespan, Blaze was a member of the MoogCast, the official The Moogle Cavern podcast.
- Blaze currently works as an Editor for TSSZ, writing reviews and posting gaming news to the front page.
Minor Accomplishments
- Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX (Producer, Designer, Everything)
- Sonic Robo Blast 2 (One of the many texture and sprite artists)
- Sonic: Time Attacked (Cutscene Animator)
- The Third Mario Brother (Animator, Producer, Director, Voice Artist)
- Chip Hardcheese in the Second Dimension (Animator, Producer, Director, Voice Artist)
- Abandoned (Garry's Mod Machinima, Animator, Producer, Director)
- Halloweenies (Producer, Designer, Everything)
- The Darkness (Producer, Designer, Everything)
- Sonic: The Fated Hour (Unreleased, Producer, Designer, Everything)
- Sonic Adventure: SRB2 (Unreleased, Producer, Designer, Everything)
- Shadow of Chaos (Unreleased, Producer, Designer, Everything)
- The House (Producer, Designer, Everything)
- Blazefire Videogame Radio (DJ)
- The Graveyard Shift: Halloween Internet Radio (DJ)
- Konami Sponsored Lost in Blue 2: Get Lost in Fiji Short Story Competition Runner-up
- Gamefunk.com Mascot Character Design Competition $50 Runner-up
- VGviews.com 3-Months of Wii Contest Review Competition 3rd Place Runner-up
