Version 1 (Late year 2003)
In 2003, the Sonic Cage Dome debuted as a basic Sonic The Hedgehog resource fan site. Known as Knux at the time, Charles (Zizou) Leclerc produced the entire website from scratch. He was a regular member in the SSMB and, just like many other fans, he wanted to start his own thing. He eventually made acquaintance with amateur animator, Michael "Morph" Ingraldi. "Knux" decided to give him the title of co-founder of the Sonic Cage Dome. The Sonic Cage Dome v1 was hosted by Digibase.ca operated by Digital Xeron. And so it began.

Version 2 (Mid-early year 2004)
The second version of Sonic Cage Dome was still only operated by Zizou & Morph and was also a failure. No online gaming yet, but the layout was just like any SCD creation, sweet and unique. The downfall was that the site was slow-loading, and incompatible with the FireFox browser due to poor coding. The site was never finished. It would have taken them too much time to make something that wasn't going to be compatible for everyone. Zizou & Morph split and never heard from each other for over a year.

Meanwhile
Zizou played online first person shooter games, such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat developed by the company Valve. He participated in a few teams (clans) before he started his own called "The Green Berets" for Day of Defeat. He even built a website for them. As the leader, he had a fairly difficult time with some of the members whom were older than him. Some players ranged from the age of 18 to 40. Despite that fact, his members asserted to him that he was a good and reasonable leader. The team did quite well and participated in a few leagues. This experience gave him the motivation to become a true leader.

Version 3 (Mid-late year 2005) [ View Layout ]
It all started again in the month of July. Zizou contacted his old friends Morph and FastFeet for some motivation to start a new Sonic Cage Dome. At the time it was still hosted by Digibase. The goal there was to start something totally new that would have a huge amount of potential so that the site could grow fast in a short amount of time. The idea of a Classic SEGA Sonic Online Gaming community, where anybody could just play old SEGA games against each other just for fun, appealed to many new members, including one of their most important web developers and current radio host, Mike Taylor. The first Sonic Cage Dome flash intro was made with Flash 5. That was all of the Flash software the SCD team had at the time; nonetheless the intro looked great. It illustrated Sonic playing extreme sports to motivate new gamers to play there. SCD had its first 2 online tourneys on the Anti3D.com Kaillera server whom we asked permission for. They eventually became strong partners with Anti3D and still are today. Digibase was starting to get slow so we moved out on August 5, 2005 onto the Sonic Classic server. We obtained the new URL www.scd.sclassic.net that matched our service perfectly.

Sonic Olympics 2005 (Late year 2005) [ View Layout ]
The event was first introduced with a stunning video that created a whole lot of excitement inside the Sonic Fan Community. It was something unique, timely, and just had the word fun sizzling on it. It attracted players far and wide, from sites across the globe, including one of SCD’s best players, SpinDashMaster, who went on to help SCD as a top advocate. Even the top websites, The Sonic Stadium and Shadow of a Hedgehog, joined in on the event. As the TSS site owner, Dreadknux, said "The Sonic Olympics is an event for one thing, that's just pure & simple, fun." The Sonic Center ended up winning the Sonic Olympic Games by a silver medal (2 points) from host community Sonic Cage Dome.

Version 4 (Late year 2005 - Early year 2006) [ View Layout ]
The games concluded and the torch was blown away. The 4th Version of the Sonic Cage Dome was the best layout ever created in its history. Not only was it functionally sound, the team was able to salvage all of the old version 3 web pages so that nothing would have to be remade. Morph created a new small quickie flash intro to welcome members to the site, and the SCD Hookup was born. It was a unitary label for the following sites: Sonic Cage Dome, Sonic Olympics, SCD Online (forums), Sonic 360 Zone (news), and Morph's Corner. It was the fastest growing hostee on the Sonic Classic cooperative. It was even planned to have all of the SCD Hookup merged with the Sonic Classic Cooperative, to create a large sonic fan network to rival against The Sonic Stadium. Instead, Sonic Cage Dome ended up moving onto TSS Network, because its growth was so rapid, the SClassic host was getting overwhelmed. It was then that the fifth version of SCD was already in development...

Version 5 on TSS NET (Early year 2006 - Sep. 17th, 2006) [ View Layout ]
The fifth version of the Sonic Cage Dome website was proudly hosted by the TSS Network. It was a big step for Sonic Cage Dome; because, for the first time, everybody was able to become more familiar with the organization than ever before. The site was able to operate with a TSS Network Account, so that helped to promote the site quickly. An array of new features to SCD, including the Emerald Challenges, and a second round of the Sonic Olympics drew forth more demand for SCD than ever. Over the period of time the site was hosted at TSS NET, it possibly became the most popular and interactive website on the network, not including TSS. After a couple months, the SCD staff felt that it was time to take SCD up a notch, and as a fan site, we believed that there was nothing to lose.

Version 6: The Hookup Returns (Sep. 17th 2006 - Mar. 2007)
All of the cards appeared to be played out correctly during the massive move. The soniccagedome.com domain grew popular quickly. Since its first days of the move, SCD went from 100 visits per day to 300, and today it’s almost at 1000. The hookup also became pretty decent as a network of sites. There were several new obstacles though. First, the site went down on the day of release. It took about a week to put it back together. Secondly, in March '07 the site and forums crashed big time. So SCD had to, in a moment’s notice, convert the forums to vB in order to keep the data. IPB technical support did nothing, neither did the hosting company. Ever since, the team had been working on Generation 7. On the way, the forums have suffered quite a bit from lacking staff moderating the whole thing. But, generation seven changed everything yet again.

Version 7: Generation Seven (July 7th 2007 - Feb. 2008) [ View Layout ] [ View Splash Page ]
'Generation Seven' made its debut on the web on July 7th 2007. It won several Sonic Site Awards. It was also a major push from SCD to really start marketing itself as one of the major sonic sites. SCD was no longer 'just' that one gaming site people happened to know. No, not anymore. SCD was now host to some of the best content on the web with hookup sites such as the Sonic Technical Institute (Formerly known as SCDTi) for fan games, SEGA Games Radio, The Sonic Show, and SCD Online, our massive message board. The new look nearly was, 'as good as it gets,' but things still didn't seem to work out as well as they should have... Our existing members started to feel that we were shifting from our original purpose, classic Sega online gaming, which was true, we wanted to start doing other things too. Consequentially, SCD no longer attracted the gamers it once did, but noobs instead. Even some of the people in our staff were noobs, they never even played online once in their life and even started being all bossy.
Long-time member Strong Bad (Gold Medalist in the Sonic Olympics of 2006) became SCD-G Staff during Gen 7. He was further promoted to Moderator within a month. A month or two of moderating duties passed. Following a conversation with founder Zizou about forum home efficiency and sparking user interest, Strong Bad was promoted to Administrator of SCD-Online. In this position, he immediately implemented a more efficient and appealing forum homepage by reducing clutter and merging a few forums. Ultimately, his efforts and ideas could not revive Sonic Cage Dome's activity, and after a long period the Executives made a decision. The website as a whole was entirely shut down due to a very catastrophic and disappointing community it now had generated. No one wanted to have anything to do with it. Before SCD pulled the plug, its member count reached over 1500 registered users in about a year.

Version 8: The Sonic Cage Dome (August 9th 2008 - November 2009)
The following passage was written by webmasters of Sonic Cage Dome in the beginning of Generation 8 and reflects on how the Administration felt about Generation 8 and Sonic Cage Dome as a whole at the time.

Fights have been fought. Along the way we have lost many of our most honored members. To our surprise, some of them have returned to restore to full blossom what SCD was once all about: Commitment, Faith, Dedication. Lessons have been learned. Staff underwent a total clean fall when the site was shut down. A month-long process of handpicking a crew of twenty of the most talented people from across the globe has yielded teamwork unlike ever before. Most importantly, everyone on the team is now doing everything it can to get their work completed. Even though some of the staff members (including web developer and radio host Mike Taylor, and gaming department and staff head SpinDashMaster) are being bogged down by college, work, and personal responsibilities, they’re spending every minute they can to pitch in and develop the big picture. Today we stand before you with what we believe is our best version of SCD to have ever been made. We hope you, too, will stand with us on this new frontier of fun and excellence.

Generation 8 was released on August 9th, 2008, to coincide with the Summer of Sonic event, attended by SCD web developer Mike Taylor and SCD Founder Charles Leclerc AKA Zizou, as well as other (? names/info needed, contact Strong Bad on the forum to provide info) SCD users/staff members. The site design was excellent and was perfect for SCD's needs. The forums were opened, and Chaos Emerald Challenges/Achievement Challenges began. The Award system on vBulletin was used for the Chaos Emerald/Achievement Challenges, and was very successful. The Emerald Challenges were complete, and those members who had earned seven or more (of a total of eight) of them were granted Super Member status and allowed access to the Super Emerald Challenge forum. Activity was sparked. Things were looking alright for SCD. The SCD remained active for a while. However, during and after the summer of 2009, things took a turn for the worse...
Zizou/m1ike_taylor had lost interest in operating the site and so gave a joint ownership of SCD to SpinDashMaster and Nelspike TX. Most staff members were excited about this, as it was supposed to mean that the Sonic Cage Dome would be under new administration that had the passion, ideas, and the means to implement those ideas to run SCD.
Unfortunately, soon afterward, both Nelspike TX and SpinDashMaster seemed to disappear from the Sonic Cage Dome. They hadn't signed on in literally months, and by association, the site and forums were essentially webmaster-less. Activity continued to decrease. Without SpinDashMaster, the Super Emerald Challenges became stagnant, and no new challenges were released. Many other staffers became inactive, and activity continued to decrease.
Many behind-the-scenes events took place, including two administrators resigigning. Despite the previous passage's optimistic outlook and strong sense of work and dedication, and the challenges and efforts put toward Gen 8, things once again looked bleak for the 'Cage Dome.

Version 8.5: Phoenix Downed? (November 2009 - Present)
In early November of 2009, Strong Bad, hitting a bit of a low point in his regular life, decided to return to SCD. Things did not look good for our hero the 'Cage Dome. Strong Bad noticed several issues with the forums and the site in general. He volunteered to become SCD-G Staff. Seeing as there were very few options left for SCD, Admin at the time Dark Sonic promoted Strong Bad to become SCD-G Staff, as he once was in Gen7.
Strong Bad then continued to grade every single ungraded challenge entry that had accumulated over the past few months. Though, as he couldn't very well accomplish much as SCD-G Staff, he was soon promoted to his prior position during Gen7 as Administrator. A lengthy amount of reforms took place that would take far too long to list. One of the more noticable changes would be the visual look of the main website. It now matched the forums aesthetically, thanks to efforts of both Strong Bad and VexusVersion. Additionally, several features of the website were improved or added, and some were removed because of their lack of use.
SpinDashMaster returned for a brief time in November that year, and during this time he released 3 of his Super Emerald Challenges. These challenges were extremely daunting, as expected from the Super Emerald series.
Much of SCD Staff were extremely excited about the reforms put in place. There was very little dissent to any of the changes. Time moved on and things got done.
In the Spring of 2010, Strong Bad set up and hosted the Spring Olympic Games, titled "TSC & SCD at the Spring Olympic Games," as a precursor for the true Sonic Olympics to take place in the summer. There was a decent amount of participation, and in the end SCD earned the most points (mostly due to the online events that TSC'ers typically don't enjoy competing in). Competition was fun and things were looking good for the future of SCD.
In April, SpinDashMaster once again returned to release the Clear Chaos Emerald, as well as the Super version of this challenge. Many players saw this as one of the most difficult challenges released yet.
At the time of writing, the Super Emerald and Chaos Emerald series is set to complete in July to coincide with the start of the Sonic Olympics. Development of the Sonic Olympics website is underway, as well as much more for the future of Sonic Cage Dome. Stick around for the ride and you will not be disappointed.

This page will be updated appropriately at different times. This article was originally written by SpinDashMaster and later updated by Strong Bad and published on April 13th, 2010.