HIST-OHR-Y
Part I
by RinkuHero

I plan these to go through histories of different aspects of the OHRRPGCE; here's a history of the major messageboards and community sites used. Some of these dates are only estimates because no accurate records were kept, because nobody ever thought (or, thinks now) that it was important enough to do so.

OHRRPGCE NEWS SERVICE - The first OHRRPGCE review site and messageboard. Existed in 1998, owned by Cloud(18324). This is the grandfather of all OHRRPGCE community sites, and it's the only site on this list that was before my time. It has games listed that are forever lost, including the first version of Fantasy Under a Blue Moon X. It had three reviewers: Ben-Ohki, Phil (who later became Specplosive), and Muuki. The games released and reviewed on that site included the OHRRPGCE classics Antigone, Desoto, Dragon's Quest, Tetra, and Watching Hours Go By. In retrospect the reviews on this site were very short and uninformative in comparison to what we get today; often no longer than a few sentences and a set of numerical ratings. Those of you familiar with Ryan Simonetta, creator of Magnus, will find this little tidbit pretty entertaining.

THE OHRRPGCE HELP-ME BOARD - This board had the longest lifespan of any OHRRPGCE board; 1998 to 2005. This board was orientated around technical questions and learning the OHRRPGCE, there was little to no general chat. Games were usually released on other boards, but occasionally on this board as well: the excellent game Tremor was released on this board exclusively. The archives of this messageboard are much more complete than the archives of the others. My clearest memory of this board is James Paige saying that I was officially the only one who could use the term "wish list", and of answering dozens of basic questions that people wouldn't have asked if they had read the documentation.

RPG-ONLINE - Created by Ubersteve, then known as HuckdOnFonix, and was a long-lasting review site which succeeded Cloud's. It was created in about 1998, and lasted until about 2000. It was dominated by the members of Red Murdock Software. It was known for harsh reviewing criteria. When Ubersteve left the community the site was shut down. Here's one of its earlier locations. Its reviews were much better written than the ones on Cloud's site; games reviewed included Destiny Calls, Paladus, Fat Frog, BloodFest, War of the Elements, Origin, Land of the Mystics, Mofas, Magic Force, Paranoia Star, Monterey Penguin, and Evil Dead (which was the highest rated game, at 97%). There were many reviewers, but the most prolific were Specplosive and Magius. It also featured many game design articles by Vidual, which are still useful to developers even today -- and unfortunately, they're lost to the ages.

OHRRPGCE MESSAGE BOARD - This was the dominant messageboard when I entered the community in the summer of 1999; it was started by Ken Soto, who stopped running it in 1998 after that a member named Neodeath took it over. A flamewar erupted, and Neodeath quit; Fortis started a new one, gave admin access to Stellar X, who hijacked the board for about three weeks (it was during those three weeks that I entered the community). It was shut down after Fortis started the Zantetsuken board (below). One day, I remember going to this site and seeing a rotating smiley face that StellarX had put there, along with a message that the board was shut down. [Note: thanks to Fortis for recounting this part of the history.]

OHRRPGCE/ZANTETSUKEN MESSAGE BOARD - After Stellar X shut down his board for personal reasons, a board in a similar style was set up by PK-Fortis. This board had a relatively long life -- from about 1999 until about 2002 -- and it's the board on which I was the most active, so most of my memories of the OHRRPGCE community come from this time. There was also a General Message Board for talk unrelated to the OHRRPGCE by community members. This board later moved to a second location in a new style. This is generally considered to be the OHRRPGCE's "golden age" -- more great games were created and released during the Zantetsuken era than any OHRRPGCE era before or after it. Unfortunately the message board's archives are almost totally lost, which is a pity, as it was very active and has thousands of interesting message threads; it was on this board that I met many of my long-term online friends, and I'm sure the same is true for many other people there.

BLACK SUN - This board and community site appeared around 2000, lasted until around 2001, and was in direct competition with RPG-Online, it often direct-linked to the games on RPG-Online, stealing their hosting bandwidth, which obviously got Ubersteve & company pretty angry. Despite that ridiculous episode, the site had some value and some games which could not be found anywhere else were found on this site, and its reviews were usually well-written. Unfortunately the site is lost to the sands of time.

OHRRPGCE OTAKU - This site never really got off the ground (at its peak it had 5 reviews), but it was intended to be competition with RPG-Online. It was mainly operated by Fyrewulff and Melnazar. Trivia: OHRRPGCE Monthly was originally hosted here (and then, later, on RPG-Online). Second archive here. Trivia: Fyre attempted to re-launch this site at least six times, each time giving up. Never give up!

OHRRPGCE MONTHLY & REASONABLY SEPTAWEEKLY - My OHRRPGCE Magazine. Began 2000, ended 2002. It had a popular Top30 list, a large number of reviews and previews, fan art, and so on; I modeled it after Nintendo Power. Hopefully it helped people make better games, its focus was on getting people to think about their games and the community more like the way that they think of their favorite games of the past. I wish I had updated it more often and put more work into it, but otherwise I'm proud of the value it had to its readers.

OPERATION: OHR - This was more or less a higher-technology RPG-ONLINE, created by Cody Watts some time after the fall of RPG-Online, and it lasted between very late 2000 and very early 2003. Cody however didn't have much time to run it so its ownership jumped back and forth, at different times T-Master and Moogle1 and Aethereal owned the site, passing it on like a hot potato. This was the first site with an automated games list, and it has a HUGE list of games relative to all previous OHRRPGCE game lists (although not quite as huge as that of Castle Paradox).

BLACK SHEEP OHR - Created by Scyree, this was a humor-oriented OHRRPGCE site, it was like the OHRRPGCE's equivalent of The Onion, with fake stories abounding. It lasted from 2003 to 2004. If you only check out one site in this history, this should be the one.

CASTLE PARADOX - This is a pretty long-lived community site, and still the current one. It began in 2003 through the efforts of ChaosNyte/Chocobo Knight, Gilbert/Bastardzero/RollingStone, and Moogle1. Its original intention was to provide a messageboard where games would not be judged harshly and newbies would be welcome, because he felt that the Zantetsuken messageboard had too much of that -- especially after it was "taken over" by the Heroists, who had suddenly all become mods on Zantetsuken. It was later taken over entirely by Inferior Minion. Unfortunately despite how much work was put into the site's infrastructure, the community started to go into decline soon after the inception of this forum, both in terms of the number of games released and the quality of those games. This was nobody's fault, except the march of game technology and the availability of ever more game engines, leading to the imbalance between new people entering the community and old people leaving in favor of the latter. But this site still possesses the largest online collection of OHRRPGCE games.

OHR WEEKLY - A side project on Castle Paradox, created by CN 2004. It aimed to be a weekly OHRRPGCE periodical; but like OHRRPGCE Monthly, it didn't live up to its name, although it lasted more than a dozen issues. I never really read it, so I can't say much about it, except that its comics, done by Fenrir-Lunaris, seem pretty popular among the community.

HAMSTERSPEAK - This site, started in 2007 by Paul Harrington in an attempt to get the community active again.

Future HIST-OHR-Y articles will deal with other aspects of the OHRRPGCE's history, so stay tuned!