Bandwidth is expensive. Torrents are free! And the more folks downloading, the faster it goes. Everyone wins. If you're not familiar with torrents, please visit the OCR torrent page.

In case you have not heard, the very excellent Sonic 3 & Knuckles project, Project Chaos was released yesterday. You should definitely check it out, and as always, use the torrent if you're able!

Two of the tracks from Hedgehog Heaven have been re-remixed. Sadorf finally gives us a sample of the other dozen or so versions of his track, and richter teams up with The Prophet for some live-action Robeatnik love. Check 'em out!

Thanks to Liontamer, the Universally Acknowledged Ambassador to the VG ReMixing World, Hedgehog Heaven now has its very own Wikipedia Page! Thanks Larry! Also, though it's somewhat old news now, HH was mentioned on Slashdot. Can you say 8,000 hits in 2 hours?

A radio show called Press Start recently had a show featuring some tracks from Hedgehog Heaven and an interview of yours truly. Not a huge deal, but hey, hear me make an ass out of myself.

The project began on September 20th, 2003, with no real goal and hardly any organization. I had just recently discovered OverClocked ReMix, the incredible place where music and game lovers come together in a blissful celebration of games and nostalgia. The music people make there is incredible and infectiously inspiring. The fact that regular people at home (often just on their PCs) were making music that good completely floored me. That, combined with the ingenious Relics of the Chozo and an oldschool Sonic the Hedgehog compilation CD my friend KREATIVEassassin made for me inspired The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Project, later dubbed Emeralds of Chaos, now dubbed Hedgehog Heaven.

Hedgehog Heaven should have failed. It started just slightly before the infamous failed Starfox Project, but really didn't get any attention until a few weeks into it. If memory serves, between then and now there have been around a half dozen tentative projects that have either blown up or fizzled away into nothing. The reason this one succeeded when others didn't is thanks to dedication (word of mouth and encouragement from fans such as njsykora, among others), hard work (particularly nesper, Sadorf, Joker, analoq and Hadyn), and outright stubbornness (I shoulda gave up a long time ago, but I can be relentless).

The project began with no real goal. Within the first few pages of the forum thread, I even mention people just doing "whatever" and that I was considering remixing each track myself in addition to what anyone else did. Not only was that sloppy and way too ambitious, but would anyone want to listen to several hours of Sonic 2 music? Maybe, but really that wasn't a realistic objective. Eventually the project adopted the single-track method and began slowly trudging forward. I really think the main problem along the way was people just not communicating. Private messages and emails were ignored. People were passive and unresponsive. There were more than a few ReMixers that squatted on a track for months at a time, just to end up dropping out before the last deadline. Eventually deadlines were dropped completely.

For a while the project looked like it was doomed, but I don't think anybody really wanted to see it die, especially with ReMixes such as analoq's three tracks being done for so long and folks just aching to hear them. I went back to school and kinda forgot about it for a while, but thankfully it picked back up and went through a pretty fast and furious mixing spur. The last FOUR tracks alone took like six months (ouch), but when people finally signed up for those they blew through them pretty quick. When the project was 90% done, djpretzel graciously offered to make it a site project, and there we have it. Joker and Hadyn finished the last two, and Sadorf finally finished his damn twelfth version. COMPLETE! And it only took about a year and six months! ... ...

My name's richter. I managed this project and I made this site. Hedgehog Heaven was coded from scratch with gVim and uses XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Flash. Graphics were ripped from the game and edited with The Gimp. Pages were tested on Windows XP/MSIE6.0, Windows XP/Firefox, Gentoo/Linux Firefox and Mac OSX/Safari. Each page validates as strict XHTML. I'm aware that some of the links display a little buggy in MSIE. Blame MicroSoft.

Thanks for visiting and enjoy the music.