Alright, I'm back, and now that I've had time to fully gather my thoughts about all this, I'll be sharing it here. Because I spend a good portion of my day now compiling weird experiences involving the Sonic Item Monitors, I've finally grown to appreciate just how... weird of a design choice it was. In Zelda games, you find items in treasure chests after clearing a dungeon. In Metroid, you recover alien artifacts in ruined caves. Hell, even in Mario the question mark blocks make more sense thematically than a random television screen lying around that you destroy for power-ups. It's never been too odd to me, but now that I'm noticing it I can't really ignore how out of place it is.

Ramblings aside, I've been getting two main comparisons; Polybius, the mythical arcade cabinet that caused addiction and MKUltra-esque psychological symptoms. The second, more infamous comparison was "Sonic.exe", a 2011 shitpasta that plagued the internet for years. I was already pretty familiar with Polybius, but Sonic.exe is something I have purposefully avoided for good reason. If it was able to help my investigation, then I figured I would check it out.

...

it was shit. "But maybe there were a few kernels of truth in the story," I thought to myself with optimism. The more I searched through the story, the less hope I had. In all honesty, Sonic.exe is just a dumb story made by a kid to scare and impress his friends. Some of the elements of the story do resemble the my investigations, with the glitching title screen and out of place audio and visuals being the most obvious. Maybe the author had owned one of these tampered cartridges, and was scared by it so much and was inspired to write this story.

I'll be reading all of your responses, and hopefully shed more light on this mystery. See you soon!
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maybe "JC the Hyena" isn't what he seems... part of me thinks that he could be part of the cult, producing self-aware propaga