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What was your first forum website?

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MMarston

Was getting caught part of your plan?
I mean, we all had to start rambling our internet shit somewhere. Also, how was it?

Anyways, my first experience in direct internet discussion debauchery was in KHForums.com back when I was at the tender age of 13 (2005) due to my excessive love for Kingdom Hearts at the time.
Now, I've surpressed most of the memories I had as a member there, but all I have to say is I did a lot of stupid, immature crap in my time there due to my age (even wrote a god-awful fanfic while I was at it).

What's kinda sad though was, despite my behavior, it was a very lively and sprawiling community on there back then. When KH3 was announced last year though, I decided to revisit it due out of curiosity and found there was nothing but pretty few stragglers left and just barely any discussions were active. The long wait has clearly taken its toll.
 
Bungie.net... Spent a lot of time over there. Stopped visiting when they changed the site a few years ago and Bungie became obnoxious as all hell.
 
Hmm. As a 32 year old I used the net periodically from '98 onwards but didn't really use forums a lot.

I guess proper forum dwelling kicked off on either AICN or Team Xbox forums depending on what my mood was at the time.
 
Red Storm Rising's community forums. They were the original developers for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six series before Ubisoft snatched them up. I came in right as the sequel "Rogue Spear" was coming out, so I guess that'd be about... 1999. There was an IP forum where you could post your IP address and host games for other people on the forum to join, since an IP connection was faster and more fluid than using Microsoft's Zone or MPlayer.

In fact, I still have some of the killscores I kept around from those days:

bAMtlWj.jpg


Back in the original R6 days, everybody online was using or abusing the CAR-15, since it had the best accuracy, same damage as the longer M-16, and fastest rate of fire. This had to do with the fact that the three round burst was broken, and each squeeze would fire three rounds in a perfect pattern, simultaneously, instead of in real life, which would fire three rounds one after another. Because of this odd design quirk, three round burst was actually significantly faster in delivering bullets downrange than firing full auto. And the shorter length of the CAR-15 gave it better handling characteristics than the longer M-16, which only had the advantage of giving you a slightly longer zoom. This wasn't really a useful feature at all, unless you happened to be playing on Airport or Road and planned to just camp at long range.

By the time Rogue Spear came out, the guys at RSE had figured out their mistake with the three round burst programming, so it ended up being normalized and thus useless. The new modus operandi in RS multiplayer was to grab the MP5-PDW, which was the shortest MP5 in the game and thus had amazing aiming while circle strafing. The zoom was really short, but this again didn't much matter since the crosshairs were so tight already and the maps weren't particularly large. If you did want to do some sniping, you'd generally grab a bullpup like a Steyr Aug or an L85 Enfield. The other great attribute about the PDW was that it was a literal bullet hose, with an amazing full auto rate of fire. In fact, the rate of fire on the PDW was often so overwhelming that you'd find yourself running out of ammo after a few squeezes, requiring a reload before you'd finished a duel. This led to me actually switching over to an MP5A4 for a while because the A4 was pretty much like the PDW but with a lower, more manageable rate of fire.

But boy... those forums were fun. There happened to be a certain split between the community, between those who enjoyed strafing around the map with the PDW, like me, and those who found this unrealistic and preferred standing still and shooting with assault rifles. Two of these realism guys were Phoenix and Mekhazzio. Funnily enough, they fancied themselves dragons. We all kinda figured this was a sort of online affectation that they were roleplaying as. But uh... then... then Phoenix kinda revealed that he really did believe he was a dragon. Like, for realsies. We were all... a bit surprised about this. To say the least. Forum reveal.

Mekhazzio went and joined the dev team for the tank sim "Steel Beasts."
 
Unrivaled, which was a Dragon Ball Z and eventually Naruto forum I think. It started out as dragonball-gt.com but then Funi bought it from the guy and we were just unrivaled.info. Not nearly as big as planet-namek but still a fairly active forum in its heyday. Made a lot of friends there, and learned a bit about myself.
 
For me, it probably would have been around 95-96, at some Sailor Moon (lol) fansite. It wasn't even really a forum (it may have been before the message board format was really a thing), just a stream of random posts. After that, there was an anime forum (anime club?) and what I think was Cartoon Network's Toonami forums.
 
Late 2006 when I joined the Midway forums.

I remember totally calling Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe like a year before it happened.
 
Fires of Heaven, an Everquest guild that moved to Dark Age of Camelot. While I had a Nintendo as a kid MMO's are when I became a gamer. DAoC, EQ, WoW, Eve, AC2, and a few others I don't remember any more. Lost a shit load of my life to that crap for nothing. When you set an alarm clock for relic raid or station attack you should really rethink what you are doing with your time.
 
a forum dedicated to fan translation of RPGMaker (2... I think?)

i remember the translator was named Ch33s3

he was hella l33t

it was like 1998

e: also Zophar's Domain
 
Mad Onion aka Futuremark. Helped me build my first PC back when I was young and dumb. Had a decent gaming community as well, getting me into probably my favorite PC games of all time (Morrowind, WoW, ect).
 
First forum was fighters.net, a fighting game website. Must have been late 1999 or early 2000. Would sit and spam F5 looking for any new stuff to read. I felt like I knew each and every poster personally even though I didn't post nearly as much as everyone else. Kind of a weird thing, since here on GAF I don't pay attention to anyone's name to be honest and everyone has a similar "voice" and sense of humor to me.
 
The forum for Lord of the Rings Online like a year or two before it released.

I think so anyway, I can't remember using any forums before that.
 
Adult Swim Message Boards. I still game with a lot of the same people I met there, but I left the forums years ago cause it got too full of stupid.
 
I used to be on gamespot but migrated to gaf after I got banned from there. I actually had registered for gaf and forgot about it, then 6 months after the ban I checked my email and I had been approved.

Came to gaf for gaming, stayed for the OT.

LOZLINK said:
Gamespot Systemwars
Click to expand...

Oh god. Remembering those days makes me cringe.
 
Gamerankings.com back in 6th grade. Tried to act mature since I was such an angry 12 year old, trying to lie and say I was actually 16 and posting about how much I loved punk pop. Makes me cringe just thinking about it. I think there were only like maybe 20 people who posted there at the time
 
Flashplayer which was the main competitor to Newgrounds back in the early 2000's. The site is gone now (except via the Wayback Machine) it was eaten up by UGO (the ones who also get 1UP) and turned into UGOplayer. Some point around 2010 the site was shut down.
 
zogdog.jpg


A small websites and forums that probably nobody here has ever heard of. So many good memories there though. :)
 
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