The story became so popular and attached to the wider Sonic franchise that the official Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter account has referenced the story on two separate occasions. JC-the-Hyena would later resign from authoring new Sonic.exe projects after multiple allegations of pedophilic and predatory behavior surfaced in 2021, with the story's fan communities taking control of it since. Sonic.exe received two lesser-known sequels, a rebooted story in 2017, many unofficial games based off of it, as well as other tributes and parodies. The story became popular partly through a genuine appreciation of the story's content and scariness, and from those mocking the extremely poor quality of its writing, which has also been described as amateur and cliched, and later lead to it being removed from the Creepypasta Wiki. 'Sonic.exe' is a creepypasta story originally written by JC-the-Hyena, a user on the Creepypasta Wiki, about a cursed CD-ROM version of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, notable for its malicious depiction of Sonic, giving him black eyeballs with glowing red pupils.
