Sonic HQ has been online since 1998. That’s longer than a lot of you have been alive, and honestly, longer than most of the sites we started out linking to. Over those years the site has been rebuilt more times than we can count, but this one is different. This isn’t a fresh coat of paint on the same old frame. Almost every part of the site has been torn down and rebuilt, and alongside it we’re launching something we’ve wanted for a very long time: Sonic Blast, our own community platform, built from scratch and running right here on HQ.
Here’s what’s new.
Pick your look
The most immediately obvious change is that Sonic HQ now has skins. Not one design, but several, and you can switch between them whenever you feel like it.
Mania is what you may be familiar with. Clean, bright, and modern, with the chunky confidence of the game it’s named after.
Archive is for the nostalgic among you. We went back through the old “newsite” layout, pulled the original palette apart color by color, and rebuilt it as a modern, responsive theme. It looks like the Sonic HQ you remember, except it works on your phone.
Generations is brand new! Hand-drawn SVG zigzag edges, a tilted red sidebar, decorative corner flourishes, the whole thing leaning into that mid-era Sonic title-screen energy.
Switching happens instantly. There’s no page reload, no white flash while a stylesheet loads, and on browsers that support it you get a smooth crossfade as one design dissolves into the next. Your choice is remembered, so the site looks the way you left it every time you come back.
The music player, rebuilt
The old player was showing its age, so we threw it out and started over.
The new one is faster, lighter, and doesn’t fight with the rest of the page. Track cards have been redesigned from scratch, and there’s now a fixed transport bar pinned to the bottom of the screen. That means you can start a track, keep browsing news, comics, and forum threads, and the music keeps playing. No more losing your song because you clicked a link.
The player also looks correct in every skin, since it has its own styling layer that adapts to whichever theme you’ve picked.
A site that actually moves
Navigating around HQ now uses view transitions. Pages fade into one another instead of blinking, and when you click a featured image, that image smoothly grows into the header of the article you’re opening. It’s a small thing, but it makes the whole site feel like one continuous space instead of a stack of separate documents.
Mobile got a lot of attention too. The desktop and mobile headers used to be two separate pieces of code that drifted apart over time. They’re now one unified navigation system, which means fewer bugs, consistent behavior, and menus that stay open when you actually want them open.
The comic database
Our comics section now updates itself.
We built an import system that pulls solicitation data straight from the publishers, including full cover art. It understands variant covers and grabs all of them, not just the main one. It knows the difference between an Archie issue and an IDW issue with a similar number, so nothing gets mixed up or overwritten. And it keeps itself organized by series and publisher automatically.
Practically speaking, this means the comic listings stay current without anyone manually typing in issue numbers at midnight.
Around the site
A few smaller things worth mentioning:
- Featured posts carousel on the front page, so the biggest stories get the space they deserve
- Redesigned article cards across every skin
- A proper changelog with a timeline layout, if you want to follow along with what’s changing week to week
Introducing Sonic Blast
Now for the big one.
For years, the site and the forum lived in two separate worlds. You’d read the news here, then open a second tab to go talk about it somewhere else. Sonic Blast closes that gap. It’s community software we built ourselves, and it brings the forum and the site together into one place.
What you can do
Forum threads, on the site. Active discussions surface as cards right in the community view. You can see what people are talking about without going hunting for it.
A community gallery. Share artwork, screenshots, sprite edits, whatever you’re making. Post images directly or link them in from elsewhere, and Blast indexes them into the gallery either way.
Journals. Long-form personal posts with multi-image uploads. Sketch dumps, project logs, retrospectives on a game you just replayed. It’s your space to do something more than a forum reply.
Followers. Keep up with the people whose work you actually want to see.
A community wiki. Collaborative pages for characters, games, continuities, and fan history. Wiki links throughout the community show a preview card when you hover over them, so you can get context without losing your place.
GIFs. Because of course. There’s a built-in GIF picker in the composer.
Real moderation tools. Our staff have proper tools to keep things running smoothly, which means the community stays the kind of place people want to spend time in.
For existing forum members
Sonic Blast is bridged directly to the forum, so your account, your posts, and your history all come with you. Nothing was left behind.
Go have a look
Everything above is live now. Pick a skin, put on some music, and go poke around. If you find something broken, tell us, because with a rebuild this size there’s always something.
Twenty-eight years in, and we’re still here. Thanks for sticking around.
— Sonic HQ staff