History of the Eggman Empire

2002: The Story Begins

It was February of 2002. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle had been released for the Gamecube. I, a 13-year old who'd grown up on Nintendo consoles and didn't know much about Sonic at the time, took my first steps into this unfamiliar franchise. I started the game up, chose the Dark side story first, and was immediately blown away by what I saw: Dr. Eggman busting into Iron Gate, laughing confidently as he blew away every military robot in his path. "Who is this guy?" I thought. "He's so cool!" As I kept playing the game, I'd see his more vulnerable side in the last story, as he reminisced about his childhood looking up to his grandfather. Eggman wasn't only cool, he was nuanced and deep (at least to my middle-school sensibilities). This first exposure to Eggman would ultimately change my life.

I became obsessed. Not only with Dr. Eggman, but with the Sonic series as a whole. I began searching for all the information I could online. It didn't take long before I ran into Sonic fansites like Sonic HQ, the Sonic Foundation (which is no longer up), and others that populated the early-00s Sonic scene. And I thought, "Hey. I could do that!" So I did. ...Sort of.

This first attempt actually wasn't a website at all. It wasn't even called "The Eggman Empire." It was an AOL Group called Robotropolis. In practice, it was a couple of image galleries and a little built-in forum (more like a comment section than a true message board). But it was a web address that belonged to me, and that meant something. We would soon migrate to Yahoo Groups (keeping the Robotropolis name), before finally, I began work on an actual website.

The first true iteration of The Eggman Empire launched on August 5, 2002, and was more like two websites frankensteined together - a homepage on Angelfire and the actual site contents built with AOL Hometown's EZDesigner, a visual HTML editor that didn't require me to know any coding or scripting knowledge. And it was exactly what you'd expect baby's first website to look in the early 2000s: auto-starting background MIDIs, animated gifs galore, and a truly janky layout that didn't adhere to any sense of organization. Unfortunately, there are no surviving screenshots or web archives of this version of the website. It's been lost to the sands of time.

But it was here that I began meeting some of the EE's first principal figures. Ishntknew (who saw me advertise the site in my forum signature on the EarthBound fansite, Starmen.net) entered and won the site's banner contest, creating a banner for other sites to link to us with. He would stick around as a regular, creating fanfiction like "Aboard the ARK." It wasn't long before he was promoted to moderator at our site's fledgling forums.

Other mods would join soon after; Inferno Boo, Disaster the Hedgehog (later Picadura the Scorpion), and my real-life friend Caleb (who went by several online handles including Shadow, Metal Sonic, Aqua, and Eggchao) would all join and contribute to the early site culture of EE's first year, and would all escend to the mod team - or known as the "ESSISSS" - Eggman's Super Special Idiot Search & Smash Squad, taking a nod from AoStH's Super Special Sonic Search & Smash Squad. Effectively, their task as moderators was to deal with "idiots" who were spamming up the forums.

But there was a problem. AOL Hometown had a hard cap of 20 Megabytes of file space, and it only took a few months before we were up against that limit. The mods and I had a discussion, and in December of 2002, the webhost Freewebs was recommended in those talks. I would remake the site on this new webhost, and even buy a domain name...

2003: The Golden Age

The EE had entered a new era: The era of dreggman.com, our first domain name. Freewebs had considerably more space than AOL Hometown, and - while we did start with its built-in visual web designer - it wouldn't be long before we learned switched to using actual HTML and began making our own simple layouts.

The culture of the EE Forums began to really grow. New members like MS2, Doctoroc, Emperor Koopatine, and others would quickly become part of the ESSISSS. The EE would also become affiliates with Ruins of the Fourth Wall (a Robotnik-centric webcomic by Jen Irwin) and the Ultimate Eggman/Robotnik Fansite (another Eggman-centric site by Jessica Padkin). Both of these websites are now long-since offline, but it was heartening to see more love for our favorite evil genius back in the day.

But what really made these times so great was us. The community. The EE had become a lively group of friends, gathering daily to spend time together and talk about everything you could imagine. Checking the forums and spending time with the other members there was the highlight of my day, and I know I wasn't alone. What we had back then was truly special.

The summer of 2003, we held our first Eggman Empire Anniversary of Yoshness, a celebration of our first year online. It ran through the month of July and ended on August 5th, our anniversary. Fans submitted Eggman fan-content to celebrate, and overall, the community had a great time. It was an optimistic time for the EE as we completed out first year online. But that optimism began to give way to an undercurrent of pessimism due to Eggman's actual performance in the official Sonic video games.

2004-2005: The Decline

As the year ended, Sonic Team released their next big 3D title: Sonic Heroes. And let's just say that Eggman wasn't exactly depicted in the most flattering light in this game. He was betrayed by Metal Sonic, locked in a jail cell for the entire game, and was generally not given a lot of agency in the story. After SA2, a game that enamored me with how badass its Eggman was, Heroes was... disappointing, to say the least. Little did I know that Heroes was only the harbinger of far worse things to come.

In early 2005, SEGA ran a poll, asking fans who they'd like to see star in their own spinoff game. The choices were Tails, Knuckles, Shadow, and... Dr. Eggman. This was our chance! The EE sounded the alarm bells, urging every Eggman fan to vote in SEGA's poll, to let them know we wanted an Eggman game! In retrospect, it's difficult to say if this poll ever mattered. After all, only a few months later, SEGA would announce their next big game, one that would became the bane of the Eggman Empire.

Shadow the Hedgehog was announced. A game where Sonic's angsty doppelganger wielded realistic firearms, grumbled mild curse words, and the alien enemies bled. By Sonic standards, this was almost edgy. And I immediately hated it from the moment I saw the initial trailer. "They're going to treat Eggman so badly in this game," I thought. And a few months later, I was unfortunately proven right, as three out of Shadow's ten non-canon endings had Eggman get slapped to death by Shadow.

Had we really fallen this far? Eggman, the awesome (yet still somewhat sympathetic and likable) villain from SA2, was now being shunted aside in Heroes and subjected to incredibly undignified death scenes in Shadow. It felt like, for Eggman fans, there wasn't a lot to be excited about from the Sonic series. Sure, SEGA threw us the occasional bone, like letting Eggman be playable in the final boss fight of Sonic Advance 3, but overall it felt like the Doc wasn't exactly beloved by his parent company. Forget our dreams of an Eggman game, at this point even seeing a big-budget 3D Sonic game with Eggman as the main antagonist felt like an impossible dream. It'd be nothing but big apocalyptic monsters from now until the end of time. That's how it felt at the time, anyway.

However, with Sonic Rush at least letting him be co-main antagonist, and Sonic Riders on the horizon (a racing game in which Eggman was slated to be a playable character), we didn't give up. Eggman still had more in his future, and so did the EE.

2006-2008: The Empire Grows

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2009-2010: Slowing Down

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2011-2012: A False Start

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2013-2020: The Blog for Robotnik Fans?

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2021-2024: The Hiatus

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2025: Back to a Website

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Looking Ahead

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