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André Dirk

From Sonic Retro

André Dirk is the original creator of the famous 'Secrets of Sonic the Hedgehog' (SoStH) website. His friend had a pre-release version of Sonic 2 (Genesis). André took screenshots of the game and put them on his site, calling the game "Sonic 2 Beta". People still use the name today.

One day he took some 'Sonic 2000' screenshots (Sonic 2000 was a fan-made game) and claimed they were from a game called 'Sonic Pastures'. This became the first page of his 'Sonic Hoaxes' section of SoStH. Other people began submitting hoaxes to the site, and soon hoaxes became very popular. All thanks to André. In other words, André started the whole Sonic hoaxing scene. And the 'Sonic secrets' scene.

One day he made some deliberately bad hoaxes for fun and put them under his site, claiming that they were created by someone named 'Samantha Clarfet' (a name that André just made up on the spot ['Clarfet' is pronounced 'Clar-fay']). Afterwards, Samantha Clarfet became a real person. It was the magic of the Sonic fan community at the time that made her come alive. She is still alive today! (In reality, it's just a bunch of other people pretending to be her).

The most famous (or perhaps infamous) of Samantha's (André's) hoaxes is the Sonic Chaos "Who will bake the pie?" hoax. Only André truly knows what that's all about.

One of the "hoaxes" was actually a screenshot of a work-in-progress game entitled Knuckles in China Land. The game was made available for download [1] 6 years after first being mentioned on SoStH.