DoctorRofatnik, known to fans as “Doc,” looked almost mayoral in a tall white hat, a red tie and an American flag pin. A smirk was permanently plastered on his face as he roamed his domain on Roblox, the multibillion-dollar gaming platform geared toward children. His name referred to the villain of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, but to thousands of players during the first summer of Covid-19, he was a hero.
Doc was the architect of the game Sonic Eclipse Online. Anyone can make a game inside Roblox’s digital sandbox, and his bootleg version of Sega’s hit franchise was a runaway success. It offered gamers a place where they could sprint across virtual half-pipes as the eponymous blue hedgehog alongside their friends, for free.
By September 2020 some 36 million people, more than half of them under 13, were on Roblox daily, making it the world’s biggest recreation zone for kids. Sonic Eclipse was a bustling cul-de-sac where children could buy virtual Robux currency with their weekly allowance, then use it to get costumes and morph into cooler characters. Doc claimed to be one of the highest-paid developers on Roblox, boasting about it to his community on the chat app Discord. There, thousands of fans who’d filtered over from Sonic Eclipse got to know him as Jadon Shedletsky, 28, “a Game Developer, Industry Visionary, and a bit braggadocious,” as he wrote in his bio. He was the California-based younger brother of Roblox legend John Shedletsky, the platform’s longtime creative director, or so he said. No one knew what Doc really looked like, but he told anyone who asked that he was buff, with blond hair and teal blue eyes. He said he drove around in flashy cars with a “hot Spanish girlfriend.”
Comments