Good day, all.

I am giovanni.gen, and I have an important update to share.

In short, I am stepping down as lead of the Sonic Hacking Contest, giving up ownership, and resigning from all of my positions.

Throughout the year, my mental health has been undeniably compromised by excess stress in my life, part of which directly caused by my efforts in day-to-day management of the Sonic Hacking Contest.

In addition, due to serious family complications, I've had to prematurely step away from my duties as a Judge, and offload management of the Contest Period to the remainder of Leadership. For transparency's sake, if it wasn't already previously noted, I have not casted any vote as a Judge, and I could not complete my evaluations. Those affected by the latter will clearly notice it in their evaluations.

These factors considered have led me to the conclusion that I am in no condition to continue managing the Sonic Hacking Contest. I hope that my efforts have been satisfactory.

With all that out of the way, I hereby transfer ownership of the Sonic Hacking Contest to Naoto_NTP. I hope that he and all else that will stay along for the ride will be able to do good with this event.

As for me, I am planning to scale back my Internet presence. For a while, I will retreat from most places, but I hope I'll be able to bounce back and return in the future.

With all this said, I thank you all for your continued support of the Sonic Hacking Contest, and I offer my special thanks to those in and out of Staff who chose to support me in any step of the way here.

With the end of the Sonic Hacking Contest 2025, it is my pleasure to announce that Judge Applications have opened up once more!

This time, we are in urgent need of Judges for the 3D Category: if you have expertise with any game covered by the 3D Category, now is your time to apply! If not, we can't guarantee other categories will be picking you up, regardless of qualifications, but feel free to apply anyway!

Apply Now!

You can now view evaluations for judged entries for this year's hacking contest!

Pardon the slight delay for this, website issues (and their domino effects) are always 'fun', you know?

Anyhow, Read them here!

That’s right! The results for Sonic Hacking Contest 2025 are now available in text-form. Serious apologies for the delay in getting this out; many of us contest staff were quite busy and there were some… interesting happenings with my session cookie that nuked the first attempt to publish this.

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The contest week is rapidly reaching its conclusion and as such there are

ONLY 24 HOURS LEFT TO CAST YOUR VOTES!

As a a reminder, you can cast your votes on your favourite entries by heading to their entry pages and clicking on the respective trophies you wish to assign to them below their download buttons.

A Sonic Hacking Contest account is required for you to cast your votes.

The official deadline is on the 13th of October, at 9:00 AM BST! Once that passes, the voting period will close!

Play the entries! Vote for them! Watch them get played! Wait anxiously for the results!

But most importantly, and yes that needs saying twice...

PLAY THE ENTRIES!

Good day, everyone!

We bring you a big haul of information for the upcoming Sonic Hacking Contest 2025, beginning in less than one week!

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Due to unforeseen force majeure circumstances, 3D Judge Sajid has resigned from the Judging body of the Sonic Hacking Contest with immediate effect.

They will not be voting for the Judged trophies.

It's official, you have...

LESS THAN 24 HOURS!

If you are in a situation where you still need to submit... too bad, because you've made a mistake that many others before you have made: with too many of you filing your submission at the last minute, you're putting the site under heavy load, so good luck managing your submission from here on out!

Anyway, reread this announcement, especially the bottom part, as it contains very useful information that may make or break you making it into the Contest or not.

And for those of you who are submitting an entry that appeared previously at a Sonic Hacking Contest, please write a public facing changelog from your previous appearance at the SHC! If you don't, we may be forced to reject your entry altogether!

The official deadline is on the 8th of September, at 8:00 AM BST! Once that passes, the submission period will close!

LESS THAN ONE WEEK LEFT!

Come the end of the 7th of September, submissions will close, and all that is there is considered **FINAL**.

Please remember to mark your submission as Complete, and to submit your trailer clips!

This is your reminder that you have two weeks left before the submission deadline officially expires! And yes, the deadline extension also applies to trailer submissions!

Remember: to be eligible for participation at the Sonic Hacking Contest, your entry MUST be marked as Complete.

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We have an important announcement on the submission deadline of the Sonic Hacking Contest!

In short, it's been postponed! Effective immediately, the new submission deadline is September 7th, 2025! This affects none of the other dates of the Sonic Hacking Contest: unless otherwise stated, everything else will still happen as scheduled!

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Tune in for a 30 minute presentation for updates on your favorite (or soon to be favorite) Sonic hacks and mods!

Please remember that, although the Sonic Hacking Spotlight is run by SHC Staff, none of the material shown is guaranteed to show up at the Sonic Hacking Contest 2025, even when otherwise stated.

The presentation begins on August 12th, 2025, at 7:00 PM CEST

You've read the title right, you've only got two weeks to submit your entry to the Sonic Hacking Contest!

We highly recommend you get to filling in your submission as soon as you can: the last few days/hours are usually when things get over capacity around here, so we highly advise filling in your entry while you still can!

If there are any concerns, you know where to find us!

We have received notice of misinformation being spread with regards to submission rules for the Sonic Hacking Contest, more specifically, about supposed restrictions, according to which, entries have to be "never before seen" to participate at the Sonic Hacking Contest.

This PSA is issued to remind you that this is not true. Submissions to the Sonic Hacking Contest can be or can have been released outside of the Sonic Hacking Contest before. This means that, if you are submitting to the Sonic Hacking Contest, you are not restricted from submitting in these hypothetical scenarios:

• Your entry was released to the public before you even started filling in the submission form;
• At any point between the Submission Period and the Contest Period, you decide to release your entry to the general public on any platform, including other events such as SAGE.

The only realistic restrictions apply to entries that have been submit before to the Sonic Hacking Contest, and that is by mandating that, in between editions of the Sonic Hacking Contest, they are changed enough. This change is enforced with two measures:

• Repeat submissions are tested for Quality Control against previous versions present at the Sonic Hacking Contest;
• Repeat entrants are required to supply a mandatory, public facing changelog.

You can read the relevant rules here and here.

If you have doubts with regards to the rules of the Sonic Hacking Contest, contact SHC Staff, and do not rely solely on the interpretation of the rules made by potentially ill-informed members of the general public.

When there are doubts with regards to the rules of the Sonic Hacking Contest, do remember that the say of SHC Staff trumps all else.

On top of SHC2025 submissions being open, SHC2025 Trailer submissions are also open!

To submit your trailer clips, you will have to have created an entry. Please refer to the previous post for more information on that.

Like for submissions, you have until August 24th, 2025, to submit your footage.

Apply here!

Hello, hello!

You may or may not have noticed a couple of updates to our website. All of the information pages have been fully updated for the Sonic Hacking Contest 2025! And, most importantly...

YOU CAN SUBMIT ENTRIES!

Before you do so, however, please read the rules! Things have been changed a bit since last year, so keep your eyes peeled.

If you have questions about the rules or the submission process, join our Discord server, or contact us!

You have until the end of August 24th, 2025, to submit your entries at the Sonic Hacking Contest!

As per last year, if you are trying to submit a team entry, please contact SHC Staff, and we'll have your existing entry turned into a team entry.

Hello!

As the Sonic Hacking Contest is fast approaching, we'll be closing applications for becoming Judges of the Sonic Hacking Contest! They will be reopened in November 2025, after the Sonic Hacking Contest 2025! We are currently in the middle of reviewing our final batch of trialists for the year, so look forward to the updated list of Judges coming soon!

As for the Sonic Hacking Spotlight, we regret to inform you that we won't be able to meet our promised release period of "late July". Instead, we'll have the presentation released in early August. This won't affect the opening of submissions for the Sonic Hacking Contest 2025: that's coming real soon!

Hello, this is NiphFM, and I’m glad to announce that the Mega Drive Music Contest has commenced its 8th round. For those who aren’t familiar, the Mega Drive Music Contest is a mini-contest held within the SHC’s Discord server, of which contestants compete to create the best Mega Drive music to fit the round’s prompt. In Round 7, rigid_atoms won 1st place, and with it, the choice of this round’s prompt.

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As promised in our presentation, we are releasing ahead of time the ruleset of the Sonic Hacking Contest. All major changes made have been clearly highlighted.

Feel free to come talk to us, if you'd like to express your feedback on the rules as they stand! The best place to do so would be our Discord server!

Read here

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