As a relatively new member, I thought it might be interesting to see how different people found their way to the CIC. Was it internet searching, word of mouth, etc...What did you think on your first visit?
Well, of course the actual answer is easy for me - I had a thing or two to do with the CIC getting out the door in the first place. But I'm not one to pass up an opportunity to tell a long and uninteresting story, so here goes...
My first experience with Wing Commander online was via Compuserv's Flight Sims group in 1992-93. If no one remembers Compuserv, they can be forgiven - it was like AOL without the sex, drugs and rock and roll... its only enduringly amusing element was that instead of names everybody got a giant number for their ID. To contact your friend you'd have to know he was user 3182013824 or somesuch. This persisted through the transition to email and so giant email lists in the mid 90s always had things like
80128302.238212@compuserv.net included in them. It was one of the rare large services that let you access it from Europe, so it was my dad's online entity of choice (he worked for IBM and they sent him all over.)
There was an online discussion group that I was mostly too shy to participate in, but they eventually formed a group of some sort (Privateers Guild? Pilots Club? I can't even remember.) I submitted my callsign and number of kills and such and they'd publish everyones information in a user-created MS Word newsletter every quarter or so. The things were huge - as many as 200kb on a service that monitered your download... so I'd have to ask my dad for permission (and he'd always say yes, because in retrospect 200kb wasn't remotely expensive.) The only other thing I remember about Compuserv was seeing chat transcripts with my Wing Commander hero, Chris Roberts! I should have gone to the actual events, in long retrospect... I called the Origin BBS exactly once in late '93 or early '94 - I was having trouble with Privateer crashing and someone was actually online who helped me. Maybe Death?!
In 1994, my dad took classes (or taught? I don't remember) at Johns Hopkins and that gave us access to their dialup internet service. This was *it*, the real wild west that became the crummy, crummy internet you see before you today. We're talking a couple of websites... I remember watching the Wing Commander groups spring up: the TCU, the Aces Club (which was *almost* always completely inaccessible!), the Jump Gate... our ancestors. I also followed alt.games.wing-commander as soon as it started - the original Netscape had a great newsreading feature that they traded for something my 14 year old self couldn't figure out. I watched the early days of agwc and agwc3, though - a little bit of fan fiction, some friendly chat, etc.
I stretched '10 free hours' a few times over experimenting with AOL. terrified that the time would disappear, I'd log in, save everything I could from the Wing Commander area and log out. I also chatted live for the first time - I was something like KTolwyn and I never met anyone who got the reference (which I thought was *oh so obscure* at the time.) I ran into someone named Drakhai at some point, but they were only interested in creepy internet sex and not Wing Commander. Oh, AOL.
In 1995 we got a regular ISP (Erols!) and I started my actual internet career. That was the year that Origin opened the place I considered (and still consider) the holiest in the world: Origin's Official Wing Commander Chat Zone. It was the Algonquin Round Table of Wing Commander fandom - just fast back and forth about all things Wing Commander with all the greats of the era... ace, Eagle, Skyfox, Bearcat... LOAF... I posted there every day from the first to the last, and the group had some amazing experiences. Coming to the forum to see what had happened and to get my two cents in was the highlight of my days in those days - which were pretty dark in general, suffering from some nasty eye problems that required many surgeries.
Soon after, Bearcat started #Wing-Commander on the DALnet, which perfected the group even further. We all became great friends. It was a magical time that I can't really explain... I'm glad to know several of the people from those days still today. We also began a lot of relationships with Origin guys which continue to this day - we have always been incredibly lucky with the amount of dedication they've shown to our interest.
Then there was Akkbar and WCHS in that same year. Akkbar started 'Introspection's Wing Commander Home Sector', which was one of the great early Wing Commander sites. It was a news site which updated periodically with longer stories - interview with someone, commentary on something, etc.
I started building my own Wing commander site, too - the "Combat Information Center" Nothing ever really came of the concept (aside from a cool logo which I wish I still had)... but a year or so in I started a 'Wing Commander 5 News' page and a 'Wing commander Movie News' page. These were smash hits, because I was obsessive - I had *everything* about either of those subjects the minute it appeared. It was just a bulleted list of facts, plus links to screenshots when I got them. Almost no design whatsoever.
Akkbar saw that my crummy litle mostly-text site (and Chris' newsgroup page, which worked the same way) was getting all the attention and offered us jobs working at WCHS. We took them and transformed the site - daily updates, a chat zone, really well done interviews instead of fluff pieces, no more stupidly critical editorials. That was where the CIC started - where we got our drive, our philosophy, everything.
Akkbar was a ruthless promoter - unfortunately, he was more interested in self promotion than he was in Wing Commander. He wanted an internet job, he wanted to make money from WCHS, etc., etc. He was also a jerk - promising to share things from Origin and then keeping them for himself. He tried all sorts of stupid things that risked ruining the site - having advertisements (we rebeled and he relented), adding other space sims (we rebeled and he created a separate 'Introspection' site for some stupid pre-MMP MMP game that sucked up to him). Then he disappeared for months and months... during which time he apparently didn't pay his internet bill and the site was taken offline.
Chris and I took everything we had from the site and put it on my server - loaf.pi.se, provided by Reaper (where are you, buddy?). We announced to everyone that we would start a new site in the near future, but that until it was ready we would run WCHS-in-exile ourselves. The last days of WCHS were a fun time, finally having creative control over everything and figuring out how the replacement would work.
We put a lot of thought into the 'new' CIC. No more system of leaders (Akkbar famously credited himself for five or so different things in the site's credits page), absolutely no advertising, a focus on archiving information and doing deeper researched articles rather than just publishing news. Basically incorporating elements from some of the late great sites (I'm looking at you, TCU) and improving them. Updates *every* day! In one of history's great coincidences, Neil Young came to Chris and I (yes, *that* Neil Young - that Electronic Arts Vice President) and said he wanted to host WCHS on Origin's servers. We said no, we'd build a new site - a better site... and then we did! I hope.
(Edit: I really miss the original CIC menus, too. Phoenix built them and they were *stunning*. These wonderful multicolor mouseovers for each link... the only problem was that they were such a huge pain to add, maintain and load.)
(Space Point)
).
Not that getting a nod in S*S [GSGT Poore, introducing the weapons section] wasn't an achievement, but it wasn't as big of one, IMO.)
