[EVENT] The Sonic Stadium 52 Game Challenge 2025 - Back for ANOTHER year running! (2025)

Event Introduction:

Returning again for another year, the 52 Game Challenge is hitting the ground running for 2025! If you missed last year's challenge, the aim of the game is simple - we're challenging you - members of Sonic Stadium - to see how many games you can finish or 100% complete within the year! Each submitted game will be added to your total, kept tracked of, and added to a leaderboard that allows you to see where you rank amongst all of the members participating in the challenge!

In exchange, a series of prizes will be up for grabs that will allow you to do various things on the site! You can earn rank points and community awards by doing helpful or noteworthy posts commenting on the games you finish throughout the year (or do a blog series, which is what some members opted for last year!), you can earn rings to use on the member shop, including grabbing our newly introduced Sonic Box Art profile gift line from the previous year's event, and you can earn yourself exclusive achievements/badges for completing the various goals within the challenge!

As with last year, additional rewards will be offered for those who go the extra mile to 100% games within the year, so go ahead - challenge yourself and see how far you can get! If you took part in the previous year, try to beat your record!

What Qualifies as a 100% Completion?

This is a metric that can't really be given a clear-cut answer for every game. Every game is different, every game offers different unlock criteria, and we want to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to giving everyone the freedom to play and pursue the games they want to play.

The easier ones is what you would expect - IE, a trophy/achievement list that designates 100% is a clear metric. Same for a save file that reads 100%, or what have you. That said, the staff have adopted a policy as taking everything case by case, especially in the cases where some games have some downright absurd and unbelievably brutal requirements for completion.

In these cases, staff will offer easier metrics for a 100% completion. For example - Sonic Heroes would only require beating the Final Story to 100% it. Shadow the Hedgehog only requires 5/10 endings and finishing the final story (depending on the version you're playing) to qualify for 100%.

While there was a few debates in our feedback about if the 100% metric should be dropped or not, the staff ultimately decided not, because the users have the freedom to choose which games they want to play, what they want to complete, and there should be the freedom there to either challenge yourself by doing longer games, or giving yourself leeway by keeping the easier/retro stuff more readily accessible.

If you're unsure about a 100% qualification, you can feel free to ask the staff about it. In most cases, if you can make a good case as to why a 100% metric should be lowered in a specific game, we'll hear you out on it.

What Else Counts as Eligible Submissions?

Due to a lot of feedback from last year, and how people have responded to the changes we made throughout the year, in addition to regular games, the following canalsobe submitted towards your totals in the Game Challenge:

• Flash/Website Games that can be completed.
• Episodic Games (count as their own entries - so Sam & Max Save the World would count as six entries for example).
• DLC/Expansions -As long as there is a definitive endpoint.
• Battle Passes
• Game Modes with end points (IE - Team Fortress 2's Tour of Duties can be submitted once each, Overwatch's story missions can be submitted, etc).
• Seasonal Events with end-points (IE - Marvel Rivals' story/seasonal events that have their own reward brackets with a straight end).
• Fan-Games, Mods, and so on remain eligible within reason.
• Rules on remakes have been lessened - if a game does enough in a remake to make it different,you can submit twice (IE - Pokemon remakes, Mario & Luigi remakes, Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, Sonic x Shadow Generations)
• Compilation Titles can be submitted for all of the games within the given collection, as long as you prove you have finished/completed all of them.

GREY AREA- One of the recommendations from feedback was allowing legacy boardgames for submissions. Personally, I'm not particularly sure how this would be gauged because of the differences between boardgames and video games, on top of the sheer niche, but you can feel free to break down how it works and why it counts if you opt to try and submit it.

What isn't eligible for submission?

As it stands, there's only three things that remain hardline off the cards for submission:

• Shovelware titles are strictlybanned. You will not receive credit trying to submit these, so please don't.
• Games within games (IE - Roblox or Fortnite game modes built within them)
• ONE submission per game- This remains in place as last year - once you've submitted a game, it can only be done once. So you can't play the same game 52 times in the year to try for a easy challenge pass.

Check-In Prizes:

As with the previous event, we love encouraging everyone to discuss the games they're playing and to do regular check-ins with their progress. While we can't offer a exclusive line of profile gifts this time, what we are offering arerank points, badges, and rings.

All three of these offer their unique things on the site. Rank points not only will help you climb up on the profile ranks found on your profile and under your posts, but it will nowalsocontribute towards the newly announced Member of the Month award:

Dread has some great prizes up for grabs for whoever manages to claim the title each month, and the 52 Game Challenge offers you a excellent chance to climb the ranks and make a play for the title yourself!

In addition,500 ringswill be offered every week for a check-in. This does not have to be very detailed - all you need to do is do a brief progress report on whatever it is you're playing at the time. Even submitting a game will count as a check-in, and this is a perfect chance to stack up a heap of rings to grab some goodies out of the member shop!

Finally, community awards will also be offered for check-in posts. If the event staff find any neat write up, or helpful posts, we'll dole out some awards and rank points for it! The better the post, the bigger the rank reward!

Monthly/Seasonal Challenges:

At least once every month, the event will have a challenge ongoing that will encourage you to pursue some games outside of what you'd normally expect. This can be as simple as playing a game with a certain character, or doing something with a certain genre.

For these challenges, not only will a bonus ring payout be offered, as well as more rank points, but we'llalsobe giving you exclusive badges/achievements to correspond with each challenge!

A new change this year is that retroactive leeway will also be granted for the challenges. This means if you finished the conditions of a challenge within 2 weeks of that challenge's announcement date, you can link us to the post and we'll mark you as complete for it. Any longer than two weeks however and you'll need to do the challenge fresh.

The Milestone Prizes:

As with the previous year, we're offering ten major milestones that will provide you a selection of prizes - these are:

Finished Game Milestone Rewards:

Finished 5 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 500 Rings
• 100 Rank Points!

Finished 10 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 1000 Rings
• 150 Rank Points!

Finished 20 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 2000 Rings
• 200 Rank Points!

Finished 40 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 4000 Rings
• 400 Rank Points!

Finished 52 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 5,500 Rings
• 600 Rank Points!

Completed Game Milestone Rewards:

Completed 5 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 750 Rings
• 150Rank Points!

Completed 10 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 1250Rings
• 250Rank Points!

Completed 20 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 2500Rings
• 350 Rank Points!

Completed 40 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 4500 Rings
• 500 Rank Points!

Completed 52 Games:

• An exclusive achievement/badge!
• 6000Rings
• 700 Rank Points!

Once again, you'll be able to use your rings in the member shop:

https://www.sonicstadium.org/membersshop/

to purchase a variety of different cosmetics for your profile, as well as other fun site benefits, so now's a great time to stock up and get some well-earned customisation!

The Leaderboards:

As with last year, we're going to offer a leaderboard to show everyone's progress on the challenge and compare where they rank to everyone else. Bare with us for a few days as we get everything organised!

Important Rules:

Due to some issues that occurred last year, I wanted to reinstate some things that was added to the challenge last year. These are:

• Evidence MUST be posted to verify a game has actually been finished/completed. This can be a screenshot, a achievement list, a trophy list, basically anything that can be used to confirm you've finished/completed a game you're submitting.
• BeCLEARif you are submitting a game as either finished, or 100%'d.Staff are not mind-readers, nor have we played every game ever to be able to determine from a screenshot what criteria you've met. You need to specifically mark if you are submitting a game as just finished, or 100% completed for a accurate addition to our backend.
• Please be respectful and patient. This is a huge challenge and a huge undertaking, and staff are taking time out of their day to organise, host, and run it. Issues/mistakes can happen, but please be respectful when bringing them up to be rectified.
• While not required, you can feel free to keep your own tally of games in case we need to recheck/recount them.
• When keeping your own list of games, ensure you are keepingtwoseparate counts - one for finishing games, one for completing games. Last year, we had several members who muddled up their lists together which made it infinitely more confusing to try and sort their entries in the backend. This year, this will not be tolerated, and we will be asking for further clarification if these totals are mixed together.

With that, that should be everything covered rules wise.

How do I join?

Joining is easy! Just pop a post into this topic showing your interest in the challenge, and we'll get you set up in our organisational backend to track your submissions.

What about games I've already done in January 2025?

We have a policy that any game that's been completed within this year, starting from January 1st is eligible. As long as you have a way of proving it was finished this year, you can feel free to submit anything from January 1st onwards.

This also applies for the 2024 challenge - we've opted for a 'grace' period where anything submitted for the 2024 challenge during January 2025 can now be resubmitted for this year's challenge, so feel free to do so for a head-start.

Can I submit games that I already submitted last year?

The policy here is simple - this is aclean slatefor everyone. What you've submitted last year has absolutely zero bearing on what you choose to submit this year. So you are free to recomplete/refinish any of the games you've done in 2024, and submit them again for 2025. Just be aware that the same game rule applies and these can only be submitted once.

I joined late, can I still join in?

Yup! Multiple people joined in late last year and were still able to finish the challenge out!

Where will announcements be posted?

Due to the feedback from the previous year's event, we're going to test run making announcements in their own place so members can easily keep track of them without the posts being lost in the flood of submissions and posts in this topic.

So with that said, you can now find any major announcements in the Sonic Stadium Staff Blog below!

Questions can also be posted either in this topic, or within the comments on any of the announcement blogs, so feel free to ask them there. Same for any queries about prizes and the like.

With all that said, I think that covers pretty much everything! Let's see how far we can go again this year, and once again - I hope you all have fun!