DOES ANYONE REMEMBER GAMINGGROUNDZERO? (REMEMBERING GAMINGGROUNDZERO)

Some history bits

Probably the earliest logo for GGZ.


https://web.archive.org/web/20090616194220/http://www.geocities.com:80/enterranet/home.html
Qheretic's old site, seems seperate from The Heresy as that has no record other than the GGZ merge. I like how the rm2k tip of the day is some advanced pseudo C++ loop. Like yeah, quick tip for a noobie from the year 2000. Other than that it has some neat screenshots of Exile and a Gamelisting containing notable rm2k games at the time.

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/rm2kinferno/ random angelfire site that surived the fallout of WEB 2.0, mentions the merger with GGZ, though using web.archive you can figure out what the directories are still and read some news. I remember that icon being in one of the staff pages. Most notable is this FF7 Fangame with screenshots. Seemed to make some custom RTP styled charas.


RPG Underground - meD's old site, mentions other sites that merged with GGZ

http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/F0X/news.html

author=JDBoone
The Return of Gaming Ground Zero 6-26-01
GGZ is back! It officially re-opened today, after the cancelation of it's merge with rpg2knet. They decided a merge would not be the best thing for the rm2k public and should be fully operational soon. Also, along with the re-opening, GGZ's staff should soon be finishing up with their muchly anticipated RPG, Kindred Saga. It will feature a great new cbs programmed by QHeretic and will portrait an astounding array of gfx, music, and story. For more info, go to their website at GamingGroundZero.com. Also, Kevin Moore from SquarEarth is re-designing the site, so the new layout should be faster, easier to use, and look much better. According to Q, it should be completed in about a week, as well as Kindred Saga.

http://www.angelfire.com/games/squarearth/home.html guy who designed the GGZ site apparently. Guessing it was the beige one? Has an interesting looking game that never got a demo. He did do Pokemon Evan's Adventure (RM95) though.




http://www.angelfire.com/pa2/falcor/main.html

Some Qheretic news posts about RM95, these are dated way before the RM2000 translation came out.

Haha, the way we(people) talked back like they were all 14 or so of age. So great!

Indeed I do. Although in the heyday of GGZ, I was at some place that I think (dear god MEMORY) was called Dark Dominion, and then at GW (fuck saltworld).

I recall that Wishmoo was a very controversial figure back in the day.

I am old.

I barely have a memory of what the forum looks like so it'd be cool to see anything resembling old history of it. As for the the old forum posts outside GGZ you can use something like https://web.archive.org/ you can't search for keywords but you can use direct urls to find anything that might be archived (i tend to find these urls by looking for broken links on existing sites). Sorry to hear about your brother and all, it's insane how many life things have probably spiraled from just GGZ alone. Though of course that applies to most of the world, a lot of things happen around us that we don't witness.

I grew up on the GGZ outskirts admiring a lot of the games on the site and just the general early RM culture. (I was probably 11 or 12 around this time) So a lot of the content is childhood games essentially. Which is something I think a lot of RM authors at the time didn't really think too much about. That a lot of lurkers who avoided interaction grow up to be influenced by these amateur RPGs. It's my main motivation as to why this type of stuff should be preserved. Anyone who grew up on SNES games can just look at old magazines or a detailed wikipedia article. But this forum thread and a few scattered blog posts is so far the only detailed proof of GGZ's past existence. So any added context would be really useful.

I had a random guy message me on FB one day praising Descendant of Truth. I thought he was either A. Trolling, or B. Utterly insane.

After all this time though, maybe not? I mean, the download for it was on GGZ for its lifespan pretty much. I still use his post for inspiration sometimes.

Strange revelation I came across when looking over old GGZ games. Anyone paying attention to indie games has likely heard of Timespinner right? The kickstarter sidescroller game with time manipulation and such.

There's a GGZ game with the same title, same protagonist name and well, same character design. It's not an RPGMaker game, it's coded in some python engine. Has a ton of midi music from Final Fantasy and MMX though:


11 or so years later...



Most likely not a coincidence, and proof that some people will keep pursuing gamedev dreams.

Wow going into this thread has been some crazy nostalgia. I've been reading site names I haven't seen anyone else write in such a long time! I'm one of the old hats, so I actually remember going to most of these sites man.

A few posts up someone mentioned Dark Dominion - this is pretty interesting and an interesting story. Because this site eventually became Dev Empire - which eventually also failed but at one point I had wound up with the sites files! As in the actual code for the site.

I was never really active on Gaming Ground Zero but I remember mining it for ideas and just generally browsing it. As others have stated, I distinctly remember Wishmoo being very controversial - but this is likely also due to the fact that I was active on RPG2knet, where I think the drama originated between the users there! Actually was Graming Ground Zero a splinter off of RPG2knet? I seem to remember Wishmoo having been an admin there originally. Wouldn't have been the last site to splinter off of that one - I admined at another for quite awhile, Blade2k.

Theres a bunch of other smaller sites that have been basically all but forgotten. I see a few users from the now and then (looking at you Gretgor) like Ultima Island, and then RPGFreeze, and a handful of other small sites that sprung up and vanished. All of the large sites from that time period are gone or just kind of a shell of their former selves (i.e. Salt World, and the fake2knet forums)

This has been a wild thread to read and has given me a lot of context and flashbacks to a time I don't give much pause nowadays.

I was known back in the pre-GGZ into GGZ days as "Silvereye", often (back then) referred to as one of the earliest of members of GGZ. Spent a lot of time in AIM chats with Illustrious (sp?), Don, Q, and Wish and a bunch of the other folks from those days.

Back in that day, I was just a late elementary school into early middle school kid in rural America with a shit internet connection and a passion to make games, fueled by LucasArts and Square games. I essentially stumbled into RPG Maker, and I genuinely don't remember how I came across Q, but soon I was a "staff" member on his pre-GGZ site.

I remember looking up to Q a lot. He was a little bit older (in high school at the time), but he experimented all the time with web tech I didn't know like ColdFusion. I remember logging into the early GGZ admin panel through Coldfusion and thinking it was the coolest thing, like I was working at some futuristic company.

Those early days had Illustrious teaching me and critiquing me all the time on pixel art. Those lessons were incredibly valuable to me. I used to do a lot of character art sets and just threw up packages of them onto the site for anyone to use. I also used to religiously search Japanese RPG Maker sites for their chipsets/charsets and lifted them for distribution on GGZ. I know now of the questionable (to say it lightly) ethics of that, but my middle school self had no idea. I was just contributing to a site I loved and felt like I was part of a great community.

My specialty in that day was prototyping new systems. I used to spend a lot of time trying to do, say.... real-time action, side-view turn-based combat (which Q pulled off before me but I always wanted to figure it out for myself), day-night cycles, etc. Whatever prototypes I came up with, I threw on the site as a "tutorial" and let folks improve as they wanted. My pet project was a full adaptation of the Dragonlance Chronicles book series into a set of games, something which I only ever showed brief demos, screenshots, and pics of character sets over time. Sad to say I never finished it and don't have a single backup that I've found yet of the game.

The lead-up to RM2k3 was a ton of trying to translate news sites and forums from Japanese ALL THE TIME. There were tons of late night chat room sessions with Don as we pasted links in yahoo translator or whatever the heck we used.... We were dying to know the new feature set, the # of variables limit, how many chipsets we could import, etc. For every right thing we probably had 20 wrong things from bad translations and us translating forum gossip and assuming it was fact.

Wish was incredibly supportive of me. I remember she always called me "Silver" and was quick to correct anyone who thought I was fake when I'd take years off and come back to chat a little more with the community. When I was in late high school, she checked in if I was going to pursue games and programming for my college studies. I believe that's the last time we interacted, and that was over 10 years ago.

Since then, I went to college and now work as an engineer in the game industry. College pretty much sealed the deal for me moving on. My posts on the forums became a yearly "hey everyone," and wondering why content kept disappearing from the site as time went on. It felt like our old history was being lost. For whatever drama existed at that time, beef between websites, forum mobbing, me getting IMs that I can't talk with ex-staffers anymore, etc etc.... It is my early foundation of how I got into game development. And for that I'm thankful. So thanks for the thread for taking me down memory lane, and I guess filling in a lot of gaps that my young naive self didn't know to recognize or chose to forget :)