AIRZONE'S PROFILE

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

Geeze, I can't believe you guys are still running this site..

I'm one of the original 4 amigos who co-founded the original site way back when.. Linguar, Kindred, Rast, and I all came to the conclusion that it would be better to work together, rather than separate.. And thus, rpgmaker.net was born. But that was an age ago and now the torch has been passed on and the community is full of the next generation of game makers.

So what happens in 15 years to an old rpgmaker.nettian?

I finished my degree, moved out of home, and got a job. Which moved to another job. And another, and now I'm on my 5th.. All in IT, and all in companies that make this, this, and this. I've programmed, done desktop support, sysadmin, network architecture, managed IT in a small 10 person site, and managed IT across 4000 users between Dubai and Sydney. Just today I rebooted someones desk phone and then went back to designing the IT environment for a new factory that we are building in Melbourne.

I got given a shitty car but my brother crashed it, so bought another shitbox, then one of these babies.. But then moved to this lol.. And another 2 since then (neither of which is turbocharged or pink).

I have traveled the world (primarily for my job).. Well mostly, Europe is notably absent, but that is because Asia was my stomping ground and the corporate head offices were in the USA. Seen slums in India, experienced Ramadan in Dubai and Chinese New Year in Singapore & Malaysia, experienced the rampant growth and development in China, and been accosted by beggars in Thailand.

I've had god knows how many computers.. My first watercooled beast involved a hydroponics pump and an open bucket of water... But my latest one is so uber that my wife wanted one - just smaller.. And let's just say it's not easy to fit 2 radiators, a watercooled GPU, 1 hard disk, 2 ssd's, a reservoir with separate pump, fan control, and lighting in a bitfenix prodigy mini-itx case.

I fell in love, got married, and had a few kids. 2 to be precise, and damn me if I can't get turn them from mummy's iPad onto a something more appropriate - like my 3ds. We moved from a shared rental apartment (we had one room), to a single bedroom rental apartment, then bought a 2 bedroom apartment, and how have a house with a back yard.

I still play RPG's, having just finished Witcher 3. The wife is very understanding of this - but then again she plays WoW and is in her realm's 2nd top raiding guild. I need to think of the next game to play... Maybe try and finish off Dishonored.

RPG Studio never got finished :( Like many other old folk, life got in the way and priorities change. A few times I've thought about kicking it off again.. But alas, there is only 24 hours in the day, and I use about 25 of them.

They say that the days are long but the years are short. And damn me, that is true. The moral of the story, therefore, is that 15 years might seem like an age, but it's not. Enjoy everything you have now because before you know it, you will have moved on to the next thing and will rarely get the chance to look back.

Let's see what the next 15 bring!