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About Us
Welcome to the history
section of LunarNET. The history is narrarrated by GhaleonOne.
Another version of the history of the site, written by one
of the first editors of LunarNET, Rudo, can be found at
RPGFan
by clicking
here. It's history includes LunarNET's earlier times,
and then branches off to RPGFan, as Rudo is Editor in Chief
of RPGFan.
In 1997, around June or so, I took up web
design. Quite honestly, at the time, I sucked at it. I created
a small website called Dragons of Destiny. This website
was basically a small Lunar club run on an America Online
message board. We decided to take up a website, and thus
DoD's website was born.
Many of its members are still around today
on the forums
here at LunarNET. I had modeled this club after the famous
Althena's Court Online, which at the time had become
a dead place. Finally, after a few months, Dragons of
Destiny merged with another Lunar club, Dragons of
Lunar (seeing a pattern here? :P), and eventually merged
into a newly born Althena's Court Online, which I
ran up until summer of 1998 when I handed the club over
to NallWdrgn. During all of this, I was also a frequent
visitor of the ever-famous Lunar Threads forum, run on Dave
Z's Sega-Saturn.com.
You're probably thinking, what does this have to do with
LunarNET? I'm getting to that.
Around the time of Dragons of Destiny's
death as a club, I started up a new website, Video
Game World. I believe the original version of that site
may still be hidden on GeoCities servers somewhere. But
anyways, after a few months and having lost my hoster at
Talon Web, VGW closed up. Around October of 1997, I started
getting this idea into my head. Why not try and create one
of those big huge media sites like SaturnWorld, IGN, GameSpot,
etc, only focusing completely on Lunar. Great idea, I thought!
I bragged about this
new "Lunar site" for months on the Lunar Threads
and over at ACO. I think most people started just saying
"yeah awesome!" just to get me to shut up about
it. :P But I started desiging the website in November and
was having a hard time coming up with a good name. I can't
remember who told me to go with LunarNET, but it
sounded good becase of the Lunar theme.
On Christmas Eve of 1997, I put LunarNET
up for the first time at the address: lunarnet.simplenet.com.
I had the site and even a few sections up and running. The
original version can still be found here.
After working for a few weeks on the site, I started building
up a small staff.
Apparently around this time is when people
started to take notice of LunarNET. At the time, many gamers
were pretty mad at Sega for not releasing some pretty select
games (Phantasy Star Collection, Grandia, etc) on the dying
Sega Saturn machine. Grandia was the one I was irked about.
Apparently someone else was none too happy either. I got
an EMail from Lunar Threads regular, Webber, who suggested
we start a petition for the release of Grandia by Sega.
Gee, we thought, what better place to host it than LunarNET?
So thus began the first major project of LunarNET.
A few days after Webber joined the staff
and the Grandia petition got started, another Lunar Threads
old-timer contacted me with something Grandia-related. Rudo
had been collecting a HUGE Grandia media archive on his
harddrive over the past few months, and wanted to house
them in what would be one of the biggest pictures archives
LunarNET would have for some time. LunarNET was fast becoming
GrandiaNET for a while there. :P Rudo, like Webber, went
on to join the LunarNET staff.
Thus we started working
on something that would eventually get pretty dang big.
Rudo, like Webber, also came up with a pretty nice invention
to bring in more visitors: A gaming network! At this time,
a sister site of LunarNET was forming by the name of GameNET,
run by other members of the Lunar Threads and headed up
by Lunar Threads old-timer, SegaBoy, who last I heard, was
writing guides for Nintendo of America, including a Zelda:
Minish Cap guide! Other websites joined up with us to try
and start a network, but unfortunately, the network ended
up failing, and LunarNET and GameNET just continued on as
sister sites. Unfortunately, the Grandia petition also "failed",
though we still saw the game on the Playstation via Sony,
albiet with horrid voice acting.
Even though those two major projects failed,
LunarNET itself gained quite a bit of traffic out of it,
and was growing at a rapid pace due to great reviews and
from Webber's work at getting hot news up fast.
At that time, we picked up a few new editors
in Commodore Wheeler, E-Chan, and Esque. Webber pushed on
with news story after news story, and Rudo and I worked
on the backend making sure all the Coming Soon pages came
sooner rather than later. E3 '98 was a blur, and while I
didn't get to go, Rudo and Webber brought the house down
with great interviews, tons of movies, and pics of the newest
games. Many things happened in those first few months: we
scored some exclusive FFVIII pics and got linked by many
sites such as GameSpot, IGN, Next Generation, and GameFan,
which was pretty unheard of for a "small little fansite".
Around the time of E3, we also redesigned
the site.
That summer we picked
up new editors, most notably one of my old time ACO buddies,
Sensei Phoenix, who went on to head the reviews section
for years. Also around this time, our Simplenet server was
suspended twice, due to having MP3s, which apparently was
a big no-no to them at the time, and which also brought
forth one of Rudo's
finest rants ever!
Quite a few other things happened over the
course of LunarNET's history. ECM of GameFan sourced editor
E-chan's wonderful Grandia translation in the magazines
Grandia review. We also had our URL mentioned in a EGM magazine
for being a "Cool Site of the Month", the scan
is still
viewable.
We also finally lost our Simplenet server
due to someone who hacked into the LunarNET server and decided
to run a warez server on a directory I never checked. That
was all fine and dandy because we moved to www.lunar-net.com
a few months before and were just using that server for
hosting movies. We always wondered why that server became
so slow for it's last few months... :P That was the first
time LunarNET was hacked and it wasn't the last. In late
spring of '99, Rudo and I decided the name LunarNET might
have been the reason our traffic hadn't been increasing
as much. Eventually someone came up with the name RPGFan.
And thus today it stands with Rudo still in charge!
I eventually lost interest in games, and
I'm still not really sure why, but eventually quit in February
or so of 2000, and stopped running any sort of website for
a while. Around that time I had also been working on a new
wesite for a gaming magazine known as Silicon Magazine,
and while it was cool getting free games for my efforts,
it just wasn't that fun anymore. Gaming was just getting
old, and I was becoming tired of the entire fansite ordeal.
Because of how burnt
out I had become (among other things), I ended up quitting
Silicon Magazine. It was nice to just be a casual gamer,
and to be able to check out all my favorite message board
spots without having the hassle of running a website anymore.
However, that would soon change yet again...
A few months later, I recieved a notice
in the mail saying that unless I renewed it, I would be
loosing lunar-net.com domain ownership. I renewed it, just
to keep the domain name ownership, but then started thinking
about the great fun I had with the old LunarNET.
I decided to bring it back, but just as
the original goal was, Lunar-only. I took the Lunar special
I had been working on since the beginning of LunarNET's
existance, and transferred it to the newly designed LunarNET
(Chronologist gets rights for this particular design). After
a few attempts at running a new LunarNET, I just didn't
feel it was the same anymore, and just left the "Lunar
special" up and practically quit working on it. I had
become pretty burnt out on games in general, and about the
only games that even held my attention anymore was the Lunar
and Suikoden series and an occassional multiplayer game
here and there.
Fast forward to 2001. I was finishing up
at the Junior College, getting ready for life at the University,
and needed a project for a few webdesign classes. Thus,
LunarNET v.3 was born! However, after about 9 months of
running the site, I just couldn't keep up with it anymore.
I was spending more and more time in my classes, and after
talking it over with the staff, I handed the site over to
Drumlord, who turned what we had built into the mega-site
GamesAreFun.com.
However, I brought back the LUNAR special once again!
This LunarNET v.4 was
all about LUNAR again! It opened up on Easter Sunday, the
day before April Fools, 2002. Coincidentally, GamesAreFun
itself opened on April Fools. :P
Around July of 2002, I unvieled the final
design of LunarNET. LunarNET v.5 was born as the ultimate
Lunar website you now see today! It is now over half a decade
old, and has already spawned two extremely popular websites
in RPGFan and GamesAreFun since it's creation.
And we're not done yet...
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