TSSZ News

» see tssznews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Twenty-one years of a fan site ended in one evening, and the Internet Archive caught the hour. At 20:31 UTC on 31 May 2020 the front page of tssznews.com was still thirteen and a half kilobytes of headlines. At 21:54 it was 3.8 kilobytes, and what it had become was a closed notice. Every crawl since then has found the same page.

TSSZ started in 1999 as a Sonic the Hedgehog news site and never stopped being one. That is a longer continuous run than most professional games outlets manage, done by one person with a volunteer staff and no advertising operation worth the name. It covered release dates, comics licensing, voice casting, the Sega of America reorganizations, the fan games, the ROM hacks. If something happened to the franchise between the Dreamcast and the first live-action film, TSSZ wrote it up, often first.

Over that span the site also became a slightly adversarial presence in its own fandom, which is the part that distinguishes a news desk from a fan page. It reported on things Sega and the comics publishers preferred to keep quiet, and it made enemies for it. That reputation is relevant to how it ended, because a site with that posture lives entirely on the credibility of the person writing it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty-one years ~

Sonic arrived in Turkey the way most console culture did in the early nineties, through the Mega Drive and through the clone hardware that was everywhere and cost nothing. The games were common. The English-language fan press around them was not. That whole layer, the news sites and the forums behind them, ran in a language and a timezone that Turkish kids in 1999 were not reading. I knew the hedgehog for a decade before I knew there were people filing news stories about him.

That is the general shape of single-franchise fan journalism. It is small, it is in one language, it runs on one person's stamina, and it accumulates an archive that nobody else is keeping. Sega was not maintaining a public record of its own announcements from 2003. TSSZ was.

~ the last evening ~

In the last week of May 2020 the protests following the killing of George Floyd were the only story in the United States. Tristan Oliver had been using the TSSZ Twitter account as a personal one, and he posted from it comparing what was happening in American cities to Sonic being chased by G.U.N. in Sonic Adventure 2 and to the plot of Sonic Forces.

The reaction was immediate and it came from the site's own readers and its own writers. Within a day the decision was made and the site was gone. Oliver's closing statement said that "everything is an extraordinary circumstance right now", that "our community and our world demands better, but now does so to unsustainable extremes", that TSSZ could no longer be the platform it should be, and asked the people reading to use their own platforms for a greater good. Kotaku's headline on it was "Sonic Fan Site Closes After 21 Years Following Very Bad Black Lives Matter Tweet", which is the whole sequence in one line.

What went with the site was the archive. TSSZ was taken down rather than frozen, so two decades of posts stopped resolving the same night the decision was made. The full database was handed to Kevin Eva at lastminutecontinue.com, who has been republishing it piece by piece ever since, and there is a separate Internet Archive collection of what could be scraped, filed under a name that tells you where it stands: The TSSZ News Archive (Incomplete).

~ what the domain still says ~

tssznews.com still answers, but only on plain HTTP. The HTTPS address returns nothing at all, which is how the site stayed invisible to anyone checking for dead domains the normal way. The page title is "TSSZ Is Closed". The background is a blurred Special Stage. In the middle is the only graphic the site ever made for this purpose, the four letters in white with Sonic's head beside them in Sega blue, and underneath, in thin numerals, 1999 - 2020.

The footer line reads "© TSSZ News LLC 1999-2020". Nobody has changed anything on it in more than six years. It has now been a gravestone for more than a quarter of the time it spent as a news site.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »