Man, I can't believe it's actually been over five years since the first FRAGtopia big LAN party. When Belial first mentioned that he'd like to see someone organize a big party in Orangeville I laughed at him and thought he was crazy. A while later I found myself as the crazy guy who was organizing it. It was a great deal of work and pretty damned scary, not to mentioned expensive, but it was very cool to see everything up and running and everyone having a good time. I've learned a great deal from organizing and helping run those parties, and made some great friends. Don't know that I ever would have met Pappy-R from Planetquake without that first party, and he's one of the nicest guys I know. It's funny how gaming and writing on a stupid little site like this can make you friends that you're still talking to years later. :) I'd like again to thank everyone who helped out on the FRAGtopia LANs and made them happen. Rune, Kingpin, Dopper, Gezerman, Goshwin, Red Leader, Mr. E Mahn, Praetorian, and of course Pappy, who ended up running all of our Quake servers and tournaments for us, not to mentioned putting up a pile of prizes and cash for the even. You guys are the bomb, and I can't say thank you enough. :) And big thanks as well to all of course sponsors for the two events who sent us prizes. 3dFX, Dairy Queen, Digital Extremes, Dlink (Booyah network!), Everglide, Logitech, Karna (Razer Mice), Mouse Skatez, PC Tote, Planet Quake, Sierra Canada, and Startech.com. Without the support of these great folks we wouldn't have had much of a party. And thanks of course to everyone who came out for the parties, especially guys like Shining Force who came from all over the United States and Canada to attend. And Pappy's Buddy Tippman who flew in from California. Now that's a long trip! I'll never forget Skeezix showing up, setting up his computer... and his Cappuccino machine.

After the second party we planned on having a third, but everyone got really busy and frankly it was so, so very much work I just decided not to do another one. Part of the problem as well was the attitude of some of the players who showed up just to play the tourneys and win some money and loot then packed up their gear and leave. For me a LAN is all about the fun and that really pissed me off. Both the Pappyz0r and I agreed that if we ever did a big event again it was going to be strictly for fun, no cash prizes.

If I hadn't gotten involved in the FRAGtopia LAN's I might never have done a news and review site and thousands and thousands of words of my wisdom would have been lost forever. There's a horror that the world must be glad it avoided, eh?

Since it's been over five years and I'm feeling all nostalgic and stuff here's a small recap of what's happened at FRAGtopia over the years. It was decided to make a news/review site on May 2/2000. The first news was posted July 31/2000. The site takes up almost 1 gig of space on the webserver these days. The archives contain almost 5 megs of text. We've done 73 reviews on hardware and software. Some of those reviews have had over 10,000 people read them. As of today the site has had 733,637 visitors and over 1.2 million page views. I remember way back when I was all in awe that we had 10 visitors in one day. I'm always impressed when I check the number of hits on the site, and look at the number of people who are reading what I'm writing. It's neat to have an audience and to know that people are actually paying attention to something you're doing.

I'm not even sure how many tens of thousands of words I've written, but it's quite a few. It always makes me feel really good to get the occasional email or ICQ comment from people who read the site and enjoy it. And of course it always makes my day to get hate mail as well which happens from time to time. (The best one ever was a guy lecturing me about saying "alot" quite often and commenting on my poor grasp of English. Hah. He had sooo many spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. Classic.)

I've learned a great deal about how people react to things by reading my mail, and talking to people who read the site. It's interesting how sometimes you mean one thing and people read something completely different into it. I really do enjoy writing, and I know I'm an incurable smartass so I've now got a place to mock and make fun of things and just generally be irreverent, and not get punched in the face too often because of it.

FRAGtopia is the largest site I've ever had anything to do with. It's made up of hundred of individual pages and it's taught me quite a bit about site management, organization and upkeep which has been important in part of my regular job, which is website design and maintenance. I've also learned alot (there's that word again!) about site design from the various incarnations of the site I've gone through.

It's been a great five years, and I hope I'm still writing here in another five. Sometimes I'm tempted to give up, it's hard to post something on a regular basis when it's just you working on it......but somehow I always end up writing again a few days later.

I like to think that maybe by running this site I've helped a few people out over the years and brought smiles to a few faces now and then. I love working on reviews of games and products, and I love being able to talk to some of the people behind the products now and again, especially some of the smaller companies making independant games. It's great when I get to have a little chat with someone like Mark Sheeky of Cornutopia or the guys over at Moonpod. It's fascinating to get a little glimpse into what makes great games and the people behind them, and share it with our readers.

Probably the highlight of all the writing I've done is either the day I got an email from a guy at Volition Software about my little spoof press release on Red Faction (Still one of my favorite games of all time) saying how much they'd enjoyed reading it. :) Or, it could have been giving an interview to the now defunct Game Citizen. There's something cool about someone asking you to do an interview, it's almost like you're important or something.

Anyhows, just to wrap this little session up: thanks to Donut911 and Dillinger. Keir (Donut) is the guy who drew the little 'nade in the logo, and Dillinger for putting up with my occasional requests for artwork. And a big thanks to Dopper, Killer, Rune, Kingpin, Skotos and everyone else who's sent in articles and posted news. Without people sending me nifty links, this site would be just me talking endlessly to myself.... and Lord knows no one wants that.

Thanks for reading the site, and see you all soon for the tenth anniversary write up. ;) Drop me a line at themarauder@fragtopia.com if you like.