I have covered the early beginning of this site as the hugely embarrassing imagisphere with the great provider list in a previous entry.

The focus changed to games in the winter of 98-99, when I fell into the game half life. Now I had always been an enthusiastic (but non hard core, they are just games!) gamer, but with half life I fell into online multiplayer gaming and a great community. I think I hung out in the newsgroup AGHL from 1998 to 2004, and still pop in it now and then to this day. But with this community came a lot of people equally enthusiastic and curious about games, games design and more, and a whole lot of debate around the matter.

At the time there was no concept of a weblog, but by today’s definition for about 4 years the site was a weblog about pc games, with a very personal filter. There were a lot of sites covering games news, but 80% of the coverage was of hyped high profile titles. I was usually interested in games that got a lot less coverage, and I wanted to get others in my circle interested in those, so I would link to any coverage, following about 15 news sites. It gave me a way to track things for myself and also somewhere to point people at when I mentioned a game and they went “uh?”.

I was still silly ambitious about side projects with no audience back then, so built a site which would list news and excerpts of coverage for (over time) several hundred games, and would allow cross navigation by game, developer, publisher, genre, and whether the game was published, unpublished or (alas) cancelled. It was rather ambitious so wrote a small set of perl scripts and templates (even though the site moved many times the scripts are still there in the file tree, and rather embarrassing). The admin was a simple set of lists and forms. The first version might have used msql, but that is lost in the mists of history. By 1999 it was on mysql, then postgresql, then back to mysql today (purely because when i moved it to a third party product they didnt support postreql).

Interestingly enough when I worked for a regional press group for 2 years between 2000 and 2002, I reused several of the perl modules I had created for this site. They were extended and grown into a full multi-site CMS and editorial system (called editorial2, highly original) and a small but fast ecommerce shop system (called simply v2) - these powered 12 city portals and over 1000 websites at their heyday. Sounds crazy, eh? What can I say, I am all for reuse! Editorial2 was abandoned when the company was bought, but v2 went on to a new life at the web agency we created as a follow up, and lived till 2007. I think at least one simple “pronouncable but never rude”* password generation routine was later moved to our next generation CMS (php) and to our Zope-based CMS, and probably lives to this day. Perhaps it will be my longest lasting technical legacy, a suitably ironic and modest one.

*(we had one report over all these years from one of our ecommerce client that one of their customers had complained about it generating a rude word. Although when we asked our client to enquire as to what it was, she came back to us saying she couldnt make heads or tails of the word -and neither could we- it was rude in some very foreign language.)

The wayback machine has quite a few snaps under iphi.net and iphi.com from 2000 onwards. Check your own site, it is a blast from the past.