More RPGDot.com background information - good times - and still some good goals for an RPG web site:
Rendelius
RPGDot's third anniversary
Rendelius, 2002-07-31
It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.
The fourth and last one for today is Rendelius, who is the founder and publisher of RPGDot and provides the means to make all of this happen. Without him there simply would not be an RPGDot.
100 unplayed games later
I recently calculated the time I have spent with the site over the last three years since I founded RPGDot in July 1999. Given that it was 4 hours a day searching news, writing them, contacting publishers and developers, answering mails fro readers, doing articles and keeping the site running, this sums up to app. 4380 hours.
This number itself doesn¹t tell me too much, so I tried to find something to illustrate what this means for my life:
If you assume that it takes 40 hours on average to finish a computer game, I could have played 110 additional games during this time. Would I have invested this time in making money, I could have bought John Romero's Ferrari with ease. Or I could have walked from my hometown to the other side of the world to meet my antipodes. In these 6 months of spare time I could have read hundreds of books, listened to 4000 albums or watched more than 2750 movies.
Instead, I spent the equivalent of a middle class car on programs, licenses, server fees and bandwidth. I stayed up a lot of nights due to technical problems with the site. I pestered developers and publishers alike to get features. And yes, all of this has been a lot of fun and rewarding.
The start of RPGDot
RPGDot started out as blinkingdot.com a small XOOM site for a game we wanted to write. It was an amateurish attempt to bring Angband into a 3D world, and we called it "Legends of the Seers". My responsibility was to create an engine that randomly calculated an island the size of Morrowind and despite my inferior programming knowledge I was able to finish the landscape engine creating 8100 square miles of credible landmass (there's still a demo version out there somewhere so if you search long enough you might find it).
In order to keep people looking at our project interested in our site, I decided to post RPG news there. We initially had 20 visitors a day, and I posted two or three newsbits every 24 hours.
Eventually, our team fell apart, and I was left with a useless site, useless apart from the RPG news there. At these days, RPGVault, RPGPlanet and GA-RPG ruled the world. There really was no need for yet another RPG news site, but nevertheless I carried on, since I had fun doing what I did.
I bought RPGDot.com as a domain and kept blinkingdot to host some small fan sites there. Late in 1999, I stumbled across a site by Sia Manzari, maintaining a very complete list of release dates. Ever in search for some content to add to RPGDot, I contacted Sia and asked him if he wanted to work with me. He agreed, and so Garrett joined RPGDot and helped me running the site.
Our growth was a slow one, but a healthy one. We didn¹t advertise RPGDot at all, our only advertising was the word of mouth that spread throghout the community. There was a new kid on the block, offering more complete news coverage than even the biggest corporate gaming sites for RPGs. Granted, our look and feel was still amateurish, and we had no database and a horrible layout, but I think our enthusiasm was felt and appreciated. We tried to cover the big players as well as smaller projects, and so we were for example about the only english speaking site spreading word about Gothic or Divine Divinity.
We were able to add great folks to the team, enthusiasts, dedicated people who donated their spare time to the project. And as the RPG fans took notice, so did developers and publishers. We received more and more material, found more and more doors open which I think is remarkable since we have no corporate power behind us, no print magazine or anything else.
Staying independent was our top priority after we had some bad experience with a network we joined. And I think this is the reason why we survived the dot com massacre the way we did. Our growth remained unbroken, and running our own server, we never were in danger to be shut down. Today, we handle more than a million pageviews a month, using app. 250 GB bandwidth and had to upgrade our server 3 over the last 12 months. I think I can say we are amongst the top sites for our genre by now, and we have great people flocking together here. Our forums are a nice place to stay, and we are
able to bring you more features than ever. Apart from RPGDot, we run sites for Gothic and Morrowind as well as Locus Inn, a site dedicated to the Infinity Engine games and Divine Divinity. As I write these lines, we are preparing a site for Neverwinter Nights, and we won't stop here.
Some statistics
Our biggest asset is our database. At the 1st of july, one year after we started with the database it contains the following:
641 games
213 comments on games
2975 game ratings
238 articles
9600 newsbits
2285 comments on news
191 information pages
And for the forum we had the follwing numbers:
88344 posts
10048 topics
2450 registered users
I think it is the best source worldwide to research a game. With over 600 CRPGs in our database now and some of them with more that 100 links to relevant articles, to their homepages, to screenshots and much more, you can't go wrong. No other site can offer you so much info on RPGs.
What's next
After these three years, where will we go now? Of course, we will try to improve wherever we can. But most important of all, I think we will develop from a news site to a community site at least this is what I envision. I want RPGDot to be a site where you don¹t just consume, but participate. Behind the scenes, we are already working on additional features. Three years from now, I see RPGDot as a site where a lot of people offer content, where you can get in contact with gamers like you, where people find
everything they are looking for regarding their gaming needs. We will try to bring together gamers, publishers and developers. This should be a home for all of them but still strictly independent from any of those. I have been in journalism for quite some time, and I know how money dictates content. Consider RPGDot as my personal endeavor to show that you can be successful without letting this happen.
I invite all of you to take part in this enterprise. Ultimately, RPGDot will be what you make of it. Ultimately, the crew of RPGDot just wants to be the tools for you.
I am really looking forward to the next three years.
Myrthos
RPGDot's third anniversary
Myrthos, 2002-07-31
It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.
The third one for today is Myrthos, who spends most of his time on the forums and the background of RPGDot, trying to keep things running and updating the site.
It started with my own site
After I've played Planescape:Torment in the beginning of 2000, I decided that this game would be the game I would create a website for. And so The Locus Inn was born in June 2000 (yes it took me a couple of months to make it). After a few months the amount of content I was adding maxed out the webspace I had at the moment and I started looking for a place to get hosted. After checking out a few of the possible hosts, I ended up at RPGSites. A server that was owned by Rendelius and that harbored several other RPG related sites.
RPGSites also had a forum, which didn't attract too many visitors at that time but there were a reasonable number at that time. Near the end of 2000 we got into a discussion on the forums about RPGDot, the sites hosted at RPGSites and RPGDot. I don't really remember exactly how it went, but I ended up disagreeing with Rendelius and continued the discussion via e-mail with him. Too make a long story short; he invited me to join RPGDot to implement what I thought could be improved, which was an effective way to keep me quiet of course
So I started hunting news and tried to bring some content to RPGDot.
The last year
In the early spring of 2001, Rendelius went on a holiday and as usual when he does that he comes back with a lot of ideas for improving the site. So we thought about what we wanted and I got someone from outside RPGDot interested enough to implement most of this. We created a new gallery and a new backbone for RPGDot, based on a mySQL database and PHP and in July 2001 we launched with the new design as we have it now.
The one who basically laid the foundation for this (Stijn Teijssen) went on to do other things and Garrett and me took over and improved a lot on the basis. There hasn't been a month without some sort of improvements in the last year (even though you might not have noticed all of them).
One of the things I did was setting up the forums and continuously improving on them. We get a lot of feedback on possible improvements and if they are viable I like to implement most of them. Another thing I worked on was getting the hosted sites up and running, allowing us to create a completely functional hosted site within hours instead of days. Luckily Garrett has taken over several of the activities in programming for RPGDot, so that we could work together on the improvements, which made it all go faster.
It has been a very busy last year. Like everyone at RPGDot I have a real life with a job and all activities for RPGDot have to be done in the evenings and nights. At times this means that playing games is out of the question as there is simply no time left for them. I'm not complaining about that, there has been much I've learned and there have been many contacts with developers and publishers I was able to make. It has been great fun actually and very rewarding when the stuff I made was welcomed by our visitors.
The future
We are currently working on a list of improvements that we want to make for RPGDot. It's not an extremely long list, but it promises to be a lot of work. We are attempting to integrate everything much more and having templates for RPGDot in a similar fashion as we have on the forums. You can login with one account on RPGDot and the forums and configure what you want to see on RPGDot and what not. This is of course optional; we will not force you to login.
We will also be integrating the gallery better with RPGDot and integrate the forums with comments on newsbits.
As usual this is what is scheduled and we sure will be trying to implement most of it as best as we can. Luckily we get your feedback on what we are doing and how we can improve RPGDot. After all this is a site created by RPG fans for RPG fans and we would like to keep it like that.
Garrett
RPGDot's third anniversary
Garrett, 2002-07-31
It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.
The second one for today is Garrett, who not only searches the web for news and provides content for RPGDot, but also programs parts of the RPGDot software that makes all of this possible.
From the beginning…
Wow, time is passing quickly. I joined RPGDot, or Blinkingdot, as it was called then, in late 1999. The guy with the 'strange' name of Rendelius mailed me and asked me, if want to move my site ‘World of PC-RPG’ to their server, because I was on a Xoom site only.
After some consideration we agreed to join forces and I quit my site, moved the RPG Lists to RPGDot and was in the RPGDot team, a newbie, who never before used a news script and it took some time to get used to the new work.
From today’s point of view, our start was really amateurish. No reasonable site layout, no database, no boards, no community, no relations to developers or publishers…just a bunch of RPG fans addicted to their hobby. Most of these points have changed, except one: We are still a bunch of dedicated RPG enthusiasts.
In the past years, there have been many changes on the site and in the team.
The site layout has changed several times, each version improved over the past (at least we hoped so), and we also did changes in the background, unnoticed by readers, like using new scripts or switching servers.
One of the more negative experiences was our move to a large German gaming network in the summer of 2000. It never paid of, in fact, it was annoying and after they went bankrupt and talked to new investors, they dropped us – which actually was the best thing to happen to us and we decided to stay independent from then on.
The biggest change happened about 1 year ago, with the introduction of mysql and php to the site and it looks like we are on the right way: A well visited forum, a great news system and many other improvments…and the best thing is, that I learned how to use php
The team has also changed a lot since 1999, but for the last 1.5 years, we have a great core team and RPGDot is mere fun!
I also was Editor-In-Chief for some months, before my RL job took away too much time, so I gave back that job to Rendelius again.
We have always tried to be the number one source for RPG news and I believe we have achieved that quite well in this past year.
…to today
But we won’t stop here. As I can see from the entries in our 3rd anniversay contest, we do not offer enough features. I agree. There are times, where we have two or three features a day, then there is a week without exclusive content. We are working on that. In fact, after the Arx Fatalis Element of the week feature last year we have finally kicked of our second regular feature last Monday with the Lionheart SPECIAL System feature.
Other improvements will result in a layout change in the upcoming months. But also the RPG market looks very promising. With highlights like Morrowind, Arx Fatalis, Dungeon Siege or Neverwinter Nights already released this year and Gothic 2, Icewind Dale 2, Lionheart or Divine Divinity upon us, there will be enough stuff to write about. Also, I am working on the first complete RPGDot Guide, which is for Arx Fatalis and should be ready by the time the international version hit stores.
Things are looking bright, but the most important thing is your feedback, as it has been in past years. Tell us, what you like and what you don’t, what you like to see here, what we can improve and so on…and we will try to deliver.
Moriendor
RPGDot's third anniversary
Moriendor, 2002-07-31
It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.
The first one for today is Moriendor, who actively searches the web for news and has been promoted recently to the head of the newsteam.
My early years
Well, most of you probably only read our news and don't give a rat's bootie about who has written them. If you still don't care, you should tune out now because I'm one of those guys who do the news for RPGDot. However, if you want to find out about how and why someone finds the motivation to crawl the web each and every day in the search for RPG news, the following might be worth reading.
I was born in 1972 and first got in touch with computer games when my parents bought a C64 in the early 80's. From that day on, gaming became an essential part of my spare time. I played a lot at home and visited friends to play at their place because my parents were rather conservative about "violent games". The C64 kept me busy until around 1989. I didn't have any genre preferences back then. I played all good games, no matter if they were action games, sports games or RPG's.
I then spent a year as an exchange student in Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1989/1990. That marked the preliminary end of my gaming activities for a while. None of my host families owned a computer and I didn't really miss gaming that much. It was exciting to be abroad and I spent a lot of time doing other stuff.
After I returned from the U.S., the C64 got shelved. It was old, boring and as a typical 17 or 18 year old male I had other things on my mind like err.., well, … chicks, beer, my 1st own car and stuff like that : .
It was a rainy afternoon in 1993 when I returned to the gaming scene. I was bored and visited a friend at his place. He owned a 386 or 486 PC and was playing this RPG that caught my attention right from the start. It was "Blade of Destiny" from German developer attic and the 1st part in the Realms of Arkania trilogy. It actually caught my attention so much that I didn't get home before the next morning. I slept a few hours and then returned to my friend's house and once again we spent the entire afternoon, evening, night and the whole next day with this wonderful, deep RPG. These were the days I fell in love with RPG's…
I bought my first own PC in 1994. The second part of the Realms of Arkania trilogy ("Startrail") was released in the same year and it kept me busy for a long, long time. I played lots of games from all sorts of genres throughout the following years. I never was a hardcore RPG junkie and I wouldn't even consider myself as being one today. I just love good games.
I exchanged my aging 486DX-40 for a Pentium 166 in 1996 and finally got hooked up to the Internet in 1997. In the beginning, I mostly used the web to search for gaming news, hints, cheats etc. but it didn't take too long before I joined my first ever forum in 1998.
It was the forum for "The Lady, The Mage & The Knight" (LMK), a Realms of Arkania based RPG, developed by German attic Entertainment and Belgian Larian Studios.
LMK was cancelled in 1999 and the whole community, including myself, wandered off to Larian Studios who began work on a new title, "Project C" which was later renamed to "Divinity: The Sword of Lies" and then once again renamed by its publisher (CDV) to "Divine Divinity".
Wait a minute. "Divine Divinity"? Doesn't that sound cheap and ridiculous for a true fantasy RPG? It sure does… Something had to be done about it and the Divinity community started a crusade around the net to make people aware of the name change. I posted to all kinds of message boards and directed people to threads at Larian's forums and CDV's message boards.
One of the sites I visited and posted to was RPGDot.
How to become an editor
The attempt of getting attention at RPGDot was very unsuccessful. I don't remember exactly but I don't think that anyone even replied to my request.
However, I found an e-mail from Rendelius, Editor-in-Chief at RPGDot in my mailbox a few days later. He asked me if I would be interested in working for RPGDot. My first thought was: No way. That's too big a thing for me. I don't have any experience and totally lack the skill to write stuff. But I thought about it. It was a new challenge. Something completely different. It took me two days before I replied to Rend that I wanted to give it a shot. He gave me his phone number and after another couple of days I called him in Vienna to talk about the details. That's how I became an "Editor @ RPGDot" in February 2001…
… and that's what I still am today.
I have a RL job so you will mostly see postings from me in the evenings or at nighttime in Europe. My current "news setup" consists of roughly 110 websites and I check each and every one of them each and every day.
I should probably reduce the amount of sites because I still find myself with zero time to play the games I cover. It's strange but I know nothing about most of the RPG's in our news. The last RPG's I finished were Dungeon Siege this year and Gothic some time last year. Except for that, I have only touched some others (like Morrowind) on the surface.
So, what is it that keeps me away from the games and makes me want to search for news? Well, this may sound strange but it is almost all about competition. I get a huge grin on my face if I find and post important or interesting news that none of the big, commercial gaming sites has posted yet. None of you will probably even notice when that happens but for me it's very satisfactory when I know that I've been faster, better than them.
I hope we're going to be faster and better on many occasions in the future. Rest assured that I want to contribute to RPGDot becoming your no. 1 RPG news resource.
We won't settle for less…
