So I guess people need a bit more history to understand why Cult was such a big site. The Sonic Hacking Scene began, essentially, in 1997 with Area51. That ran for several years, until people started to congregate on a more centralized website, with an actual forum (Area51 operated like the old web, where you'd email a webmaster and he'd post it as content on the site). That forum was hosted on emulationzone.org and was called SSRG - the Sonic Stuff Research Group. This is where people like Taxman (Christian Whitehead) and Stealth (Simon Thomley), both of Sonic Mania fame, are from. Early on, most of the research involved digging up old magazine scans of prototype levels, trying to recreate said levels in klik n play, and save state hacking -- taking Sega Genesis emulator save states and changing values (essentially game genie/pro action replay stuff) to access deleted content.
Well, around the time SSRG formed, the webmaster of Emulationzone got his hands on the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 beta cartridge and managed to dump it. This pretty much changed the entire scene. It caused a lot of forum drama, and eventually people split from SSRG. They migrated to Sonic Cult in 2002, which was brand new from a brand new scenester named Pachuka. Pach had instant cred, because he actually worked at Sega as a tester at the time, and thus had his hands on a lot of stuff. So a sort of competition between SSRG and Sonic Cult formed.
Cult would dump a new prototype, then SSRG would make some big discovery, like cracking an encryption type needed to edit art in Sonic the Hedgehog. Then Cult would figure out offset values for all sorts of shit in the Sonic Rom, and SSRG would dump a prototype. This continued for years, and really drove and organized the Sonic hacking scene into what it is today.
Cult was known for it's aggressive, 4-chan style humor. It advertised itself as "for adults." It was, truthfully, pretty childish. But a lot of legitimate mega drive hacking research came out of there. All this stuff isn't just the genesis of the Sonic hacking scene today, but arguably the entire Sega Megadrive demoscene.
Neat stuff back then.
