Dave 'Fargo' Kosak: Yep! When Mark contacted me he wanted me to help with PlanetQuake.com. Of course it's still up today, although I don't do any day-to-day work with the site anymore. I'm really stoked about what all we did with PlanetQuake. There are a lot of websites that cover gaming in general, but only at GameSpy can you find coverage that goes that deep for individual games.
Frans P. de Vries: 3D Gamers, founded in August 1996. It's gone through four incarnations, and it's the oldest 3D gaming related site by now, I think
.
Adam 'Barak' Perfect: Haloplayers.com - it's the one and only gaming site I've worked on and still work on.
Anthony 'Rayn' Maio: As I said, I worked with Planet-Tribes. I had done some person web page work here and there, but nothing serious. I read about a news opening since Imposter was going away for the summer, so I sent an e-mail to the then-Deputy-Editor Despised and he gave me a shot. That was when Tribes was still new and growing fast, so there was plenty of news and it was exciting. As things got busy at the site and Despised resigned, I took over the Deptuty Editor (basically, webmaster) duties of the site and added some new sections like the demos archive. However, things at P-T got shutdown because we exceeded our bandwidth - we used a free provider and had to put banners on our pages ... the services they provided were horrible though. It was near impossible for us to setup FTP accounts, so our hosting was stunted. P-T's death was inevitable but I think they are planning on reopening sometime soon with a new angle - its run by the same guys who run tribesplayers.co.uk. We were going to make TW look like P-T for April Fool's day this year, but when we moved servers we didn't have the time to do it.
Funny tidbit, during the whole 'Mahir I kiss you' fad, Breaker from TsN had made a flash parody of the thing with techno music and whatnot. I thought it was hilarious and posted it on P-T, where I hosted the flash. It was the first I'd seen at that point. It started going around the web and e-mails started pouring in. We've joked that the massive visitation the flash was getting was what killed our bandwidth and hence got us shutdown, but surely it was not fully responsible.
Brian Clair: My first site was called Yarlen's Treehouse and it was hosted on Syracuse University's student web server. The site is no longer online, but I still have some fond memories of it.
Before striking out onto the web, however, I helped Potsdam University start up one of their first Usenet newsgroups.
John 'Rizzuh' Jensen: I used to run a little Microsoft fan site. I just really wanted Windows 98. I wouldn't dare keep a copy around.
Louis Wu: The first website I ever built on was my grad school department's web page - that was back in early 1994, and they've long since overhauled it; the original isn't in existence any more.
The first GAMING site I ever built was the Marathon HyperArchive Northwest, which (in its second design) is still online at marathon.org: http://www.marathon.org/hyperarchive/.
It's showing its age - it came online in March of 1995, and that version was designed in early 1996. It's over 5 years old.
Rob 'Keltic' Shea: My very first web sites were pretty embarrassing and are long gone, thankfully. Before Proving Grounds, I ran a site for about a year and a half called Quakeport (www.quakeport.com). It was essentially a link directory for Quake related web sites. I enjoyed building the site and doing the coding, but the site had a very limited, essentially non-existent community. There was a fair amount of site traffic, but there was not much interaction between the users and myself. So once the fun part was done, the coding, it basically consisted of me surfing for new web sites to add to the list and approving user submitted links. That got pretty boring.
Tyler 'TySoft' Lott: The first website I really worked on was Descent related. I worked on a site named “Tricordnet” which later merged with GameSpy’s PlanetDescent. I also created a Descent community site named “Descent-X” - however the community weakened and I took down the site.
Joscha 'fraGGle' Dzielak: The first site was tribes.de but now it has a new owner and a company. So the first site is no longer active but I have a screenshot of the first day of tribes.de at: http://www.tribes-2.de/image/web1.jpg.
Matt 'Acrappa' Martinez: I was first introduced to the Internet around 1996 because my school was real heavy on computers. My closer friends were showing me a website that they had made themselves and I was simply amazed that literally anyone could make a website on their own. I quickly got a hold of a HTML guide on the Internet and got started. At the time, I was really big on Nintendo (my AOL name was NOASlave) and wanted to make a site dedicated to the recently released Nintendo 64. I called my site The Mouse House and had it hosted on Geocities. It wasn't that bad actually and for a first site, it was very good. But only for a first site.
Of course, Geocities likes to delete things so the site is no longer available. Sadly, Tommy's #1 Shania Twain SuperSite has taken over my webspace (http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/7169/).
Ben 'Hypn0tik' Tamler: Tribesplayerspage was the first site where people can go to see real-life photos of other Tribes players. The site is no longer up (for now).
Manveer 'Eidolon' Heir: Hoo boy, the first site I worked on was The Unholy Battlegrounds -- part of the then PlanetQuake network (Now GameSpy -- this was before they had whored themselves out to Satan). It was a website devoted to Diablo II (Probably the 2nd best Diablo II site out there, next to DiabloII.net). Alas, about two months ago GameSpy finally killed that site -- I was amazed it was still up. However, it did give the lead-in for PlanetDiablo... so who knows, maybe I am somewhat responsible for that site (Yeah, right).
Final Thoughts:
n/a
Related Links:
