DOES ANYONE REMEMBER GAMINGGROUNDZERO? (REMEMBERING GAMINGGROUNDZERO)

Posts

author=TheRealQHeretic
Anyway, Wishmoo died a few years ago. I don't even remember of what, probably heart disease, or lung cancer (she went back to being a smoker when I left). She had numerous health issues and was just miserable 99% of her waking life. The worst part is, my first thought was "good riddance". She was abusive, narcissistic, and a cancer in this world, and a horrible person. All the "friends" she made in the community, the very few - she put on a nice face to them but was always suspicious of them behind their backs and couldn't just trust anyone. Probably kind of awful for me to speak about her in this way, but that's the whole story of me and GGZ.

Holy hell. Appreciate the check-in and insight, I'm so sorry you had to endure all of that.

Glad to hear you're doing well nowadays. Good to see an old name pop back up.

(now we just RPG Advocate to pop up, and the oldbie trio can be fulfilled)

author=JewelKnightJess
I hope everyone in this thread is doing well during these difficult pandemic times, sending my love to everyone.
+1. <3

I'm trying to keep up with as many folks as I can recall on Twitter, but most folks have changed usernames in the last few decades (ha): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1250145855170064390
Hey! Another oldbie of RPG Maker / GamingW / GGZ past reporting in.

I got curious today and was wondering exactly what you answered. I wondered, "Whatever happened to wishmoo? She still around?" I never expected to find the answer and a lot more. I'm really sorry you had to endure that, but in some weird twisted way you didn't have to endure her alone. A lot of us, who were just KIDS this point in our lives, had at least one run in with her.

My mom was similar to an extent, but mine would gaslight me into thinking I was always doing something wrong, etc. Was completely dismissive of me. I think I had wished someone else would have believe me when it came to the crazy things she'd do, because only I'd know. I thought the similar things you did when my own mom passed too.

So, as hard as it was for you. We were all in spirit kind of along side you the entire time I feel. Those days really made an impact on a lot of people's lives.

Forgive me for bumping this thread, I absolutely 100% did not read any rules. But I saw the latest post was in 2021, so I said what the hell.

Thanks for all the answers, and it's nice to see those I recognize in this thread show up in my life again in passing. I wish everyone well!
I'm currently looking into the earliest days of the RM95 scene and gaminggroundzero.com is a site that does come up very often.
However, it's completely inaccessible on Wayback Machine. Is there a specific reason why that is the case? So was this a request by QHeretic or Wishmoo or someone completely different? (Maybe even a DMCA from some rights holders? You could hardly visit any gaming-related site back in the day without stumbleing upon links to roms & such..)

There's so much content lost here.. A huge chunk of the earliest communities were dispersed across many different free hosting sites that had strict limitations on the amount of content the site owners could share. Sites & urls changed often which probably didn't have a good effect on archiving efforts.
GamingGroundZero does stand out as it did have a top-level-domain and due to its status the Wayback crawler should have archived tons of content.

Today on visiting, there's just a basic blog which hasn't been updated in years and provided no contact info. I'm not even sure if it is still owned by the same person. Neither version of the site can be viewed on archive.org due to a domain-wide block.
As far as we know a robot.txt was put on the site meaning crawlers cant archive the ftp files. Likely Wishmoo's doing, but there's little way to know the motivations. The domain was also sold/given to someone who made a barebones gaming blog nobody cares about and I doubt the person has anything to do with rpgmaker.

One possibility is to buy the domain by whoever holds it and take off the robots.txt but I'm not tech savvy enough to know if that's a retroactive thing you can do. Looking the domain up here you can find some potential contact info. Though I think it's mostly hidden so it might be done through godaddy.

edit: also if anyone wants to actually buy the domain I recommend not tipping them to the "historical value" because they'll probably charge a lot if they have zero sentiments about it.

Well, I found something at least.. here's this odd transitionary site named "GamingOverworld", right after the merge of The Heresy with RPG Underground and shortly before it became GamingGroundZero:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021005225329/http://www.geocities.com/gamingoverworld/home.html


author=ftrbreed
That's really hard, as you're likely finding out. Forums drop support, servers go down and never come up again, etc. Even sites like archive.org are imperfect (as you can see with some of the deeplinked GGZ archives which work yet none of their child links were archived. I for one would love to see an archive of the Staff page so I can find out what the heck my bio was. I remember my avatar pretty vividly 'cause it was some terrible photoshop I did with). This is going to continue to be a problem until communities find a good way of preservation, which is also an ongoing and very serious problem in the gaming world in general. We are losing our games and source code at an alarming pace.


I realize this post is over 2 years old but here it is (at least shortly before it became GGZ):
https://web.archive.org/web/20021006020112/http://www.geocities.com:80/gamingoverworld/staff.html
author=Webbeh
(now we just RPG Advocate to pop up, and the oldbie trio can be fulfilled)


The words "Newbie crap" still echo in my head two decades on!
Lots of old memories!

First of all, I'm very sorry to hear everything you said, QHeretic. I hope all is well now.

For my own experiences: I was a very small part of the GGZ community -- I had been playing with RM2k for a few years in high school and got into the general community, and stayed with it for the first part of my college career (I would guess I was active from around 2001 until 2005 or 2006?). I started out putting together sprite sheets of existing characters (like ripping from FF6), and then I did dip my toes into some original work/edits of default sprites (I actually had a semi-successful project where I organized a few folks to make Chrono Cross sprites -- I think it resulted in around a dozen sprite sheets getting made?).

I was a member of a few different sites, but then I joined the GGZ forums and eventually became a contributor on the site (again, very minimally). I think I had the same AIM experience as many members (messages from wishmoo pretty much any time I was online, but also lots of good conversations with the other members who were around my age -- I remember Android18a!).

Honestly, overall, if you stayed out of the more toxic side of the things, the GGZ forums themselves were GREAT! Lots of people with similar interests, and overall a good sense of humor. There were places for serious discussions, resource sharing, story building, but there were also places for out-and-out shitposting and just having fun. There were also sprite competitions pretty regularly with no real prizes, but it was a lot of fun to compete against the best in the community.

For a little while I did connect with some of the members of the site after I left via social media, but I've since deleted Facebook and Twitter, so I don't keep in touch with anyone now. I still think of that time a LOT as it was really where I learned how to be part of an Internet community.
author=IceSage
A lot of us, who were just KIDS this point in our lives, had at least one run in with her.
She used to call at the weirdest times to my place, once my mom asked me who the fuck that was and then it dawned on me I'd been talking on the phone to a 50+yo from the opposite corner of the Earth.

The last call I had with her she super screamed at me and I told her there was no way she could get whatever bogus lawsuit she wanted to get me into because a) I was a minor, b) wasn't within the US jurisdiction and c) My mom, who at the time worked at the US Embassy, and my lawyer (who was my dad but a lawyer nonetheless) were aware of the threats and attitude and were ready to prepare a case if worst came to worst.

Anyways, like IceSage said, it's a good thing you survived through the whole ordeal Q, that was a strange ark in RPG Maker history in the West.

Not gonna lie, I often wondered what kind of kid you were given how much so many guys like me looked up to you, and it saddens me to see what you had to go through. Glad you're in a better place.
author=TheRealQHeretic
Anyway, Wishmoo died a few years ago. I don't even remember of what, probably heart disease, or lung cancer (she went back to being a smoker when I left). She had numerous health issues and was just miserable 99% of her waking life. The worst part is, my first thought was "good riddance". She was abusive, narcissistic, and a cancer in this world, and a horrible person. All the "friends" she made in the community, the very few - she put on a nice face to them but was always suspicious of them behind their backs and couldn't just trust anyone. Probably kind of awful for me to speak about her in this way, but that's the whole story of me and GGZ.


I'm sorry you went through all of that. I ended up moving out around the age of 18. At the time, my mom was abusing opioids and never medicated her bipolar disorder.

I've been a lurker in the community since the start. I've played all of your RM2K demos and have been yelled at by Wishmoo over the phone. :D Another friend of mine received a threatening email about legal action over something or another. I remember him calling me and laughing about it. He loved trolling her.

You always impressed me with your tricks to make RM2K do things you wanted. Like when you altered battle animations to make it look like characters were walking up to attack monsters in Exile. Or when you used a hex editor to swap out the icon palette with way better glyphs.

When you released the demo for your side view battle code with Kindred Saga, my mind was blown. I spent so much time digging through all of the events just to better understand how it all worked and was honestly amazed with how well it ran despite all of the limitations in RM2K.
I think it's the name I haven't heard in a long time.
benos
My mind is full of fuck.
624
author=Erave
I got banned on the forums after a single post. To be fair I posted something like "I hear you ban people all the time".


It's like going to somethingawful or facepunch.
author=poopsock
I've played all of your RM2K demos and have been yelled at by Wishmoo over the phone. :D Another friend of mine received a threatening email about legal action over something or another. I remember him calling me and laughing about it. He loved trolling her.


Literally zero surprise to any of that. It was a very common thing to hear her calling people in the community to threaten, harass, or just ruin their lives. She was very persistent about that much practically all of the time.

You always impressed me with your tricks to make RM2K do things you wanted. Like when you altered battle animations to make it look like characters were walking up to attack monsters in Exile. Or when you used a hex editor to swap out the icon palette with way better glyphs.

When you released the demo for your side view battle code with Kindred Saga, my mind was blown. I spent so much time digging through all of the events just to better understand how it all worked and was honestly amazed with how well it ran despite all of the limitations in RM2K.


The community never saw some of my most ambitious stuff, it never made it past the alpha phase a lot of the time. For instance I had started working on a Tales’ (of Phantasia) style combat system with fully drawn extraordinary sprite work done by none other than Akain. It was coming along as incredible as you could have probably imagined - but home tensions and her slaving me around to work on her pile of crap game she had no ability to work on herself made it really hard to maintain any of my own motivation or creativity focused in the RM community. I had also made an Exile 2.0 implementing similar side scrolling combat system as Kindred Saga but with QTE combo construction features and open ended skill chaining with party members (also using reflex driven QTE type stuff).

Man I had so many ambitious concepts that were in progress near the end of my life at home, stuff no one probably even dreamed were doable in RM2k no less. I really lament giving it up a lot still. I continued on to pursue my dreams in game development, almost even got a job with Riot Games over a custom StarCraft 2 map I made and they liked it so much they flew me out to interview with them all expenses paid. That was a trip. But somewhere between the age of 17 and now, 20 years later I just determined game development wasn’t my future after all. I sometimes wish I could get back into it, maybe work on an indie title now that game development tools are so accessible now - but I also just don’t feel like I have the ambition I used to anymore.

In any case I still love hearing that what I did in my day left some inspirational mark on the community. Thanks for sharing
...I feel kind of hesitant posting this cause I'm still sort of starstuck, lol but if you ever feel like, making something again or posting a tutorial here, I want to assure you, despite what may have happened in the past, you still have fans here Qheretic.

Years before I even touched rpgmaker, back in the 2000s, I remember Kindred Saga was talked about a lot on a web comic/anime/photoshop community thing that I use to frequent. They were really excited to finally get their hands on rpgmaker2000, but were disappointed that it didn't have a side-battle-view system like FF6 had, a game which everyone wanted to make. But then they played your game, Kindred Saga and realized it could be done -...and then sort of gave up half way through after realizing they didn't really know how to do it themselves. One of them described you're work as trying to understand and recreate blackholes in rpgmaker2000 ; but again most of these guys only knew how to use photoshop to screen grab scenes from their favorite anime and merge it with Mr.T. (for a Slayers vs. Mr.T showdown comic) it was a silly website XD.

I had a Mac at the time, so I couldn't play these games till maybe 2003, when we got another PC. But like, I remember going over to a friends house and my friend downloaded Kindred Saga and I watched him play through it. And it was such a cool feeling to see General Leo, give out a tutorial to the player in Kindred Saga - cause General Leo was such a beloved character for anyone who grew up playing FF6 in the 90s. To see him then explain the mechanics of a new game, something that was kind of similar to Chrono Trigger; the buddying magic system, kind of blew our minds (also the train scene was really fucking cool! I'm still trying to figure that one out). Kindred Saga showed my friend and I, that not only was it possible to make really great games in rpgmaker2000 that were almost identical to the ones we grew up with, but you could actually take these characters and create and tell new stories and games with them (another cool scene was Wades helmet hair, being a sprite edit of Will's hair from Illusion of Gaia? really neat, remixing, funny stuff like that). Like, I've played a lot more rpgmaker games since then, but there's also still a lot of things that Kindred Saga does right.

We were huge fans of Newgrounds and flash animated sprite cartoons, but we could never figure out how to program this stuff, jrpgs, in flash, we saw attempts from the japanese flash community - but we were just teenagers trying to finish highschool at the time. Rpgmaker was kind of like a shorter gateway to game creation for us, but then things happen and times change.

I think part of the reason why I've stayed as long as I have with the community and rpgmaker here, is because I've been disappointed that we've never seen things come full circle the same way, newgrounds and flash animation had provided new opportunities for budding animators through digital animation. I realize now that part of the reason why that is, is because there was a ton of various factors standing in the way of that. The stuff that's been mentioned here in this thread and other threads, is very similar to a lot of people's stories here, in various other communities in one way or another. Peeps turning to game creation tools for, reasons.

...But there have also been some positive inroads, stuff like, To The Moon, Grim's Hollow, OneShot and Omori now the Nintendo Switch, TimeSpinner on Playstation 4, RM2000's German Velsabor moving onto CrossCode, available on numerous platforms, Off, UnderTale, Yume Nikki, Hylics. Even more local stuff like Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass finally being mentioned on hg101 and Ara Fell, peeps are still making games, even jrpgs in one form in another. I still feel like the best is still yet to come.

7 years ago rpgmaker2000 and 2003 were finally released on steam, something I never thought would be possible. A lot can happen in another 5 or 10 years. If you do plan to come back to this Qheretic, I'm very eager and willing to wait and see what this future looks like. You were really talented.

I don't know if you'll get a chance to read this. I never thought I'd get a chance to meet ya even. Really happy that I got a chance to meet ya. but I thought I'd share while I still had the chance: Your stuff was great! ♥♥♥

If you do decide to return, in some form or another, I'm very eagerly looking forward to it.
I’m so impressed to see so many familiar names in this thread.

I went by Akain back in the day, and I contributed art and sprite work to the site. It was fun to push the limits of what 256 colors and rpgmaker could do. I did some sprites for Wishmoo’s Tabernacle and a project Q was in the early stages of development on, but lost both my personal projects due to hard drives eating dirt. Most of what people saw of my work back then were my early illustrations on GGZ’s site. (Someone in this thread called my budget-Squall sketch “concept art” and bless that compassionate person’s heart for being so generous to a teenage weeb edgelord)

GGZ forums were my first found family, I became involved with the site when I was about 16. I stumbled into it via an IRC chat towards the end of Heresy/launch of GGZ. It was my place to be as creatively cringe as possible because queer Tumblr didn’t exist yet. It was a great space to get away from my own toxic family situation and get to know other creative weirdos passionate about playing and making games and their assets.

I knew there was a lot of behind-the-scenes drama but kept my nose out of it, luckily. I’m really happy to see that a few people went on to work in the industry. It seemed we had a lot of queer and neuro-divergent young people on the forums, as well as a higher-than-normal volume of women at the time, so the insular quality of the site while toxic at times was also beneficially safe as well, a double edged sword.

It’s sad to hear about Wishmoo, I got along well with her and while I could tell she was unstable I didn’t know the extent. I’m glad Q was able to get out of that situation as no kid deserves to go through that.

I remember the community fondly and will always geek out forever more to 2D games.

authorAkain
Most of what people saw of my work back then were my early illustrations on GGZ’s site. (Someone in this thread called my budget-Squall sketch “concept art” and bless that compassionate person’s heart for being so generous to a teenage weeb edgelord)


Whoa it's cool to find out who did what when it came to the splash logos. I think you were the staff member with the logo of the red hair girl in the purple dress? I don't know why I have a strong nostalgia fixation on the site design and who all the staff were being as an outsider. Yeah it can be a little DeviantArt cringe looking back but even that stuff can become part of someone's childhood and to look up to. It would be sick to find some html archive of the site somewhere, that's an archival holy grail to me even if it might lead to some embarassment.
I remember being so impressed with Kindred Saga it influenced me to start putting custom systems in my own games, even if it took weeks to retrofit everything. At one point I remember saying that it'll be a grave injustice if this Qheretic guy doesn't become a software dev one day; glad to see that everything worked out and all is right with the world.

As for GGZ I once posted on a game topic to the effect of: "hey these screenshots look great, good luck on the game development." I was banned two days later because maybe someone saw I was a gamingw admin.
author=Darken
authorAkain
Most of what people saw of my work back then were my early illustrations on GGZ’s site. (Someone in this thread called my budget-Squall sketch “concept art” and bless that compassionate person’s heart for being so generous to a teenage weeb edgelord)
Whoa it's cool to find out who did what when it came to the splash logos. I think you were the staff member with the logo of the red hair girl in the purple dress? I don't know why I have a strong nostalgia fixation on the site design and who all the staff were being as an outsider. Yeah it can be a little DeviantArt cringe looking back but even that stuff can become part of someone's childhood and to look up to. It would be sick to find some html archive of the site somewhere, that's an archival holy grail to me even if it might lead to some embarassment.

+2
I'd love to see any artwork, just to remind me that this was once real.

author=legacy001
I remember being so impressed with Kindred Saga it influenced me to start putting custom systems in my own games, even if it took weeks to retrofit everything. At one point I remember saying that it'll be a grave injustice if this Qheretic guy doesn't become a software dev one day; glad to see that everything worked out and all is right with the world.

...Oh shit! you're uh...legacy001!! you did um...Naufraga and The Rose Chronicals right?
Welcome to rpgmaker.net!♥
Jesus christ, what an insane thread. I haven't thought of these names in decades. QHeretic, very glad to hear you got out of that shit and extremely appreciate you sharing all that. Must not be very pleasant to reflect on.

My name back then was DragonShadow. I am pretty sure I got my first pirated copy of Rm2k from you, perhaps indirectly. I remember playing a demo of "Exile" as well, and it was cool.

If you ever feel the itch to get into gamedev, let us know, it'd be cool to see what you could cook up!
Wow, what a blast from the past!

I've not touched RPG Maker since 2009 & somehow some weird nostalgia made me type in 'what happened to GGZ' and here I am down the wormhole.

I used to live on that forum between 2003 & 2005, before getting banned by Wishmoo for calling her crazy on the GamingW forum. (I probably deserved it, I was a 16 year old idiot at the time) It was a bit of a kick in the guts at the time.
Stayed in touch with a few members on MSN for a little while after.

I was never really a prominent member or anything so its unlikely anyone would remember me, but its been a good reminisce all the same.

Some of the games on there were excellent, Kindred Saga obviously, but also Exile, Crossbone, OK can't think of anymore haha.
I also remember they had a weird RPG Maker 2003 stance, 2K was OK but 2K3 not because it was... pirated? Never made sense.

I ended up at LRPGM (anyone remember that place?) and when that place died, apart from a brief foray into Ruby Scripting on RMXP (I think my A* script with a binary heap is still out there somewhere), by now I'd stop being a reclusive nerd and started actually going out, so I never really looked back.

I've actually got few old RPG Maker games in an old folder. Including the community game RPG Maker Story 1 & 2. The BEP2 demo, Exile and a fair few more.
if you have any games not currently hosted, you should upload them here. We have a special account named Aremen that creates gameprofiles for games where the creator is long gone or missing.

There's also SegNin's Obscure game thread if you want to just throw them on Mega or something
https://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/22883/?post=939959#post939959