Posts Tagged ‘2011’
Firstly, Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday season and ate terrifying amounts of food.
I just wanted to take the time to write a little post about 2011 since it was a year of a lot of personal triumphs for our fanbase. As usual things were pretty quiet on the official front this year but as always it didn't stop us from making a noise. This year marked the 15th anniversary of NiGHTS into Dreams. For a good few of us that meant a bit more than others because it was around the age of 14/15 we first discovered the game ourselves. That would make the game half our lifetime old. Appreciating anything for that amount of time is pretty special, I know it was for me. It marked a milestone for this fanbase and I was able to look back at where we started from.
I started this website years ago on my Dreamcast browser before I ever owned a PC. The only way I could upload images was to go to a internet cafe in the city to use their scanner. I'd input html code with a control pad. Hotlink peoples seizure inducing images as backgrounds. Plaster rainbow colored text everywhere like it was the greatest discovery ever and oh BOY when I found the code to embed midi's I was an unstoppable force of INTERNETS. I created my site to be able to share my artwork and love for NiGHTS. Words can't express the happiness I felt when the first person NOT trying to sell me Viagra posted a comment in my guestbook. It was a fan, an actual person on the other side of the world who shared the same interests as me. Then over the weeks more and more people came to visit the site. The community grew and grew, the Guestbook was replaced by a forum. Over time the little personal webpage evolved into the hulking global beast of the site you see today… minus the midi's.
2011 started off with the sad news regarding Mr Kevin Eva stepping down from his position as Community Manager at SEGA. He had worked his butt off to help strengthen this community in an official capacity and in the capacity of actually giving a real damn for the franchise and the people who love it. His departure left me feeling a little worried as a fan but over time it just served to make me work harder and be more determined to represent you all in the respectful, polite and creative way from within SEGA that I know you all so well for. You'd be surprised at how many people love and remember NiGHTS. Proud even, because many of them remember or came from this website. As a fanbase we are stronger than ever.
Then came the long anticipated Summer of Sonic 2011. It was an event that really gave me a lot to think about on my journey home. Not only did we get to finaly meet creators Takashi Iizuka and Yuji Naka along with a whole host of Sonic related A-listers…. but I got to meet the next generation of NiGHTS fans. DiGi was supposed to have done a podcast about this but never did, so just let me say, when really young fans approached me because of being huge fans of Journey of Dreams, I was really overwhelmed with proudness. I spotted a lot of NiGHTS cosplayers who I'd never met before. Had kids come up to me and ask me who Jackle was! haha. It's like the whole Modern Vs Classic Sonic thing that happens with Sonic fans, except there was no animosity here at all. Both classic NiGHTS and Modern NiGHTS fans were just happy to be there talking to eachother. I remembered what it was like to be a new fan to NiGHTS into Dreams. I felt really happy to sit there at our NiGHTS booth and realise that this was living proof of keeping the love for NiGHTS alive. I hope that these guys reach their 30's and have fansites and fond memories too.
Meeting Yuji Naka and Takashi Iizuka was more than a huge honor for me. It felt like we were there to say 'Hey we're the NiGHTS fanbase, so many people still care about NiGHTS, here we are, look at the things we've achieved because of NiGHTS.' So it was pretty special. Handing them over a copy of Lucid Dreaming and seeing their faces light up was priceless. I wish every one of you could have been there. It was very surreal. What really shone through was how passionate they both still were for NiGHTS despite how many years had passed.
On the subject of NiGHTS: Lucid Dreaming, I still listen to the album on repeat on my way to work in the mornings. I still can't believe fans created something so perfect. OCR are genius and I feel downright blessed to have been involved with the project. It traveled all across the internet from Kotaku to even MTV! When the teaser trailer aired on the big screen on the stage at Summer of Sonic you could genuinely feel the buzz from the crowd. Hearing people clap and cheer for NiGHTS was the greatest feeling ever! Well done guys!
2011 was also a year of campaigns. Our NiD15 campaign garnered the attention of SEGA and several large online news sites. On the day of NiGHTS' birthday SEGA turned to Facebook to ask if fans would be interested in seeing a port of the original – to a scarily overpowering YES. That one post of theirs got more responses than many of the other announcements put together. In fact the post is STILL getting responses MONTHS later. I think it's fair to say SEGA know NiGHTS is wanted now. Thank you to all 6956 of you who have stood with us through our campaign site so far. Thanks also to the fans who may not be in any active NiGHTS community but who can still say positive things about the old game through various message boards, magazines and news portals. You've all helped us a lot, but we wont give up on a NiGHTS port until it becomes a reality! So lets keep supporting the cause: http://www.nid15.com
The other big event of the year was after SoS I was gifted a huge stack of NiGHTS into Dreams concept art from the original 90's game. Some of the images hadn't been seen before outside of Japan or in a high quality. So I was blissed out to be able to share those with everyone. It's one of those strange things were a franchise over a decade old still keeps giving. I was given a lot of positive feedback on my own artwork from the creators of the game which in turn inspired me to kickstart a new personal NiGHTS fan-comic project of my own:
This will be updated regularly this year in 2012 as a way of grabbing more fans back into the fandom. I'm really excited and motivated to work on this project of mine and I really hope you enjoy reading it in the future 
Things have been incredibly busy at work for me this year but I've always been thinking of NiGHTS or how to involve the fanbase in some way or another. I miss doing lots of fanart, it's how I got started afterall, so my new years resolution this year is to work really hard on giving you all something new to enjoy reading! Through this our website will have much more regular updates from now onwards. I'm also interested in featuring your own fan comics as updates. More on that later.
The end of the year was marked by an absolutely beautiful complete christmas duet by Cameron Strother, the original singer of DREAMS DREAMS back in 1996. Two dreamers reunited again. I can't think of a better more symbolic way to end the year.
It's 2012 now. I want to echo a sentiment from my fellow webmaster Dreadknux across at Sonic Stadium. As long as there are fans I will never give up on NiGHTS or this community. Even if there were NO fans I still wouldn't give up on NiGHTS. I'd sift through pages of spambots to just find that one single real fan from across the other side of the planet who loves NiGHTS too. Real life gets crazy, busy and very demanding… but I wouldn't be were I am today if it wasn't for NiGHTS, so for that I'm incredibly grateful and will always be here.
I hope you will too.
Happy New Year guys. I appreciate you sticking with us.
xx
TRiPPY
