6th Anniversary in Hamley's

After a brief discussion with Chris about the finer details of our campaign we came to realise that even though we had created a design direction to follow, we needed to think about further issues. For example the idea that we wish to pursue is to create a large scale, interactive 'Green Hill Zone' for children to play with, however we haven't thought about the environment that this piece of design would be found in. We discussed the possibility of setting up an outdoor event, such as a tent decorated with Sonic memorabilia, but soon realised this wasn't ideal. We then listed off possible chains of shops that would be interested in hosting something like this and came up with HMV and GAME, however it then hit me that the large toy shop 'Hamley's', found in London, could be viable. Before we could go any further I thought it necessary to see if Sonic had ever dealt directly with Hamley's before and was delighted to find out that in 1997 for Sonic's 6th Anniversary there was birthday event held there. All the information below is taken from a post on SEGA Memories, found here.

"Sonic the Comic were good to me. Hell, Sega in general have been good to me as a fan, but Sonic the Comic really did throw some good stuff my way when I was a wee lad. Not only did I win a Sonic 2 patch from them when I sent in some self drawn Sonic comics, get my artwork in an issues Graphic Zone section which won me a watch, but I also manged to win a competition they held in 1997 for a exclusive 6th Birthday party event in London. Only 100 invites could be won and you could take a mate along with you, so there was a total of 200 of us (excluding parents) going to this one-off party.

Hamleys as you may already know is a huge toy shop in London on Regent Street with floors upon floors of the stuff. On the below ground bottom floor was a gaming section called Metropolis, which was Sega branded and had a bunch of arcade cabinets and a snack bar of some sort. My memory of the place is pretty fuzzy and I don't believe it's still there, and if it is I doubt Sega still has their name plastered everywhere (much like how Segaworld became 'Funland'), but it was further evidence that Sega were huge in the UK. You never saw anything like this run by Nintendo, that's for sure!

Game wise, they had a few Saturn cabinets set up with Sonic R running on them, about a month before the game was due out. There was a raffle to win a couple copies of the game early, along with some other Sonic stuff I can't remember exactly. I also remember there being a contest involving getting best scores on the arcade cabinets they had there, of which I only remember the Scud race machines which i gave a whirl and got no where in. There was goodie bags that came with a bunch of badges of Sonic running about on a Hamley's logo which I still have somewhere) as well as Sonic Jam and Sonic R posters. Neat.

The highlight of the event was a guy wandering about in a rather impressive Sonic costume (far better than the one that stumbled around SegaWorld), who was being helped around by some woman presumably due to not being able to see very well. I remember one moment when she disappeared for a bit and he manged to walk into a wall, causing Sonic 3D posters to fall all over him. How embarrassing. but I kind of wished we got that caught on camera, could of sent that to Who's Been Framed. He practically had to shove his face into the cake to even see it."

I think this proves that Sonic and SEGA have a had a lot of association with London in general and Hamley's more specifically in the past. Therefore I think that bringing the celebrations back to there for the twentieth could be a really good idea.