15 YEARS ON... >_<;

In a nutshell (from my own perspective):

It was 1999 and there was the Nexus. I had been developing an RPG maker on and off for a few years and I had just gotten an internet connection for the first time in 5 years (yes, I had it back in 1994 back when you needed to use trumpet winsock tcp/ip stack in win 3.1). I discovered rpgmaker 95 as translated by Don Miguel. Tried it for a bit and thought that it sucked. I started RPG Studio (then ISRPGDS) and once I got a bit of progress, advertised on the Nexus and it was a hit.

I soon discovered 3 other projects running in parallel. Linguar with RPGCK and Rast & Kindred with RPG Engine. Each maker was different, and had their own areas of excellence. Linguar had a compulsion towards complexity and it showed.. His engine was super flexible. Rast was writing in C++ and native directx. His engine was fairly utilitarian, but fast and required a reasonable PC for hardware acceleration. I took a different approach - graphical fidelity, awesome audio support, hardware accelerated but with a software renderer, and so much customisation that I had to implement in-memory compression and segmented loading otherwise a map couldn't fit into memory (remembering that top-end PC's had 16mb of ram back then). The compression made it finicky and unstable and in retrospect I had bitten off more than I could chew. But it was giving snes like results, so I was happy enough.

Linguar got himself a good deal on web hosting, and my web host was shit, so we amalgamated our websites. Soon after, the Nexus experienced some upheaval and went down. Kindred approached Linguar about merging our website with theirs and buying a name for it... rpgmaker.net. We jumped at the chance.

Originally we were on some shitty host (and I think Kindred and Rast were paying for it - I was in another country, and Linguar was much younger than the rest of us and still in high school). The community grew explosively - this site had the next crop of RPG Makers. We outgrew the host, and moved to our own dedicated server - a Cobalt RaQ 2 1U rackmount server. It was expensive to run thanks to the cost of rack space and internet, but we were trying to capitalise on the dot com boom of the late 90's and advertising was paying it's way. I even made a small profit one quarter.

Then the dot com bubble burst. Advertising went to shit and the site was costing (Rast and Kindred) a bomb to run. So we sold out to e-Front - which was sort of an aggregator of sorts.. Luckily we had kept the domain name, because despite their promise of autonomy and being able to have the community whole, they got shady and the site went down (probably related to the fact that internet business was worthless then).

If I recall, that is when Rast and Kindred left the community. There was a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes in IRC, and generally it wasn't helpful. But as a highlight, at one time we were running our IRC room on a server run by people who genuinely believed themselves to be dragons. I won't elaborate on the rumors.

Linguar and I were able to set up shop on a new host, and had Rast point the domain name there. It ran fine for a while and we concentrated on our makers and governing the community. But the community eventually overwhelmed the server and we had to move again.

With the community bleeding, Linguar stepped down and I was the only founder left (although I was being helped a lot by the very young Janus at that point). That didn't last long either - if I recall correctly around that time, Rast had transferred the domain name across to Bart and had it redirected to gamingw.

And that is when I took my leave.



Of course this is how I remember it from my own perspective. History is written by the victors, and in this case there were none. I'm sure Linguar or Kindred (or Rast if he's still alive) would be able to give a different account of the history of the site.. Maybe one day we will be able to get together and reminisce over a beer..


p.s. To WIP: Stay the fuck away from my sister. lol