Your first memory of GR / GRcade?

My earliest memory of this site is spotting a photo of me posted by a member I know IRL with a comment posted along the lines of "Who the strawberry float is that?"

I can’t really recall my first encounter with the GR forums, the Daily/Games Radar website used to be one of my go to sites for gaming news back in the day so I would have signed up to the old forum at some point in the early noughties but I never really posted much. I spent more time on places like rllmuk, ttlg and the ntsc-UK forums back then.

I think it was someone from the old forums that pointed me in the direction of torrents for the early Consolevania episodes back in about 2004/05 which felt like a great discovery at the time!

I arrived when SONM closed, probably should have made the move sooner though.

Bunni wrote:Eugh. Remember when Karl was actually 12.

Yesterday? Yeah I can just about remember that far back.

Bunni wrote:Eugh. Remember when Karl was actually 12.

I arrived in a lifeboat while watching the S.S. ONM go down.

Apparently I signed up like a year prior to that and just never posted.

Chocolate-Milk wrote:I arrived in a lifeboat while watching the S.S. ONM go down.

It went down like the Titanic, slowly, and with a band playing.

I used to browse the GR forums but didn't sign up, then saw it was dying and a few desperate attempts by people to be THE new forum came and went, before I saw a link to GRcade. I didn't sign up to that either, until I saw people moaning about how crap it was on the ps3 that you had to install updates before playing, when I knew you could just press circle to skip it. I signed up just to say that, so whoever that was is directly to blame for me being here.

Vermilion wrote:

Chocolate-Milk wrote:I arrived in a lifeboat while watching the S.S. ONM go down.

It went down like the Titanic, slowly, and with a band playing.

Not with a bang, but a whimper

I've been trying to think for ages what made me originally sign up for the old GamesRadar forums. I think it was around 2003ish? I guess it must have just been a link off the site. Although I got Edge and GamesTM at the time, I think it was my main source of 'up-do-date' gaming information.

Then I found the Random Fury! Halo 2 clan and spent many, many nights playing with those guys. Toxic was always around online. I'm sure a couple of us even tried branch-off and create a competing clan at one point I remember playing a bunch with KJGarly and I think a guy who's tag was just 'Steve' or a variant of that. Both from Liverpool if I remember correctly. I'm sure we also played on the regular with another member who was hard-of-hearing who had a Pokemon avatar (sorry, if you are still about and reading this - no recollection of your gamertag!). Then I got introduced to WoW and fell off the console multiplayer radar for a long time.

Then I moved to Glasgow for Uni and disappeared for ages. I moved there too late for any meet-ups there anyway as I remember reading about them.

I recognise lots of names from back then but not much about them. There was one guy who would just argue about everything. Some hip hop or rapper type name. Actually was his name just rapper? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

$ilva was the most argumentative IIRC

JT986M2 wrote:I've been trying to think for ages what made me originally sign up for the old GamesRadar forums. I think it was around 2003ish? I guess it must have just been a link off the site. Although I got Edge and GamesTM at the time, I think it was my main source of 'up-do-date' gaming information.

Then I found the Random Fury! Halo 2 clan and spent many, many nights playing with those guys. Toxic was always around online. I'm sure a couple of us even tried branch-off and create a competing clan at one point I remember playing a bunch with KJGarly and I think a guy who's tag was just 'Steve' or a variant of that. Both from Liverpool if I remember correctly. I'm sure we also played on the regular with a guy who was hard-of-hearing guy who had a Pokemon avatar (sorry, if you are still about and reading this - no recollection of your gamertag!). Then I got introduced to WoW and fell off the console multiplayer radar for a long time.

Then I moved to Glasgow for Uni and disappeared for ages. I moved there too late for any meet-ups there anyway as I remember reading about them.

I recognise lots of names from back then but not much about them. There was one guy who would just argue about everything. Some hip hop or rapper type name. Actually was his name just rapper? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Think he went by slicedawg for a bit,

Bunni wrote:Eugh. Remember when Karl was actually 12.

He's 36 now.

I think I signed up to the old GR to talk about Far Cry or something as I was having problems installing it and when I Googled it it led me to the forum.

I remember it was the same day that I went to see Foo Fighters at Earls Court in 2005 as I posted just before leaving and was hoping to come back to loads of answers on what to do but I don't remember getting any. Mad that i've been here since I was 15 and am going to be 30 in a couple of weeks.

Prototype wrote:

JT986M2 wrote:I've been trying to think for ages what made me originally sign up for the old GamesRadar forums. I think it was around 2003ish? I guess it must have just been a link off the site. Although I got Edge and GamesTM at the time, I think it was my main source of 'up-do-date' gaming information.

Then I found the Random Fury! Halo 2 clan and spent many, many nights playing with those guys. Toxic was always around online. I'm sure a couple of us even tried branch-off and create a competing clan at one point I remember playing a bunch with KJGarly and I think a guy who's tag was just 'Steve' or a variant of that. Both from Liverpool if I remember correctly. I'm sure we also played on the regular with a guy who was hard-of-hearing guy who had a Pokemon avatar (sorry, if you are still about and reading this - no recollection of your gamertag!). Then I got introduced to WoW and fell off the console multiplayer radar for a long time.

Then I moved to Glasgow for Uni and disappeared for ages. I moved there too late for any meet-ups there anyway as I remember reading about them.

I recognise lots of names from back then but not much about them. There was one guy who would just argue about everything. Some hip hop or rapper type name. Actually was his name just rapper? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Think he went by slicedawg for a bit,

Rapper was a strawberry floating hero and I won't hear any different.

I don't remember him being overly argumentative though. He just loved Celtic, and scientific pappiers.

Pretty sure it's Dblock.

At first started posting on forums at Nintendo.co.uk which is probably the same reason why I'm rifling through all of their lost gooseberry fool now, and that's also how I learnt HTML, by checking Right Click > View Souce on Nintendo's website back when they still made sites using JSP.

I was lead to Gamesradar by the URL advertisements in NGC mag which I still have a few years issues of literally right next to me on some shelves, then I joined the forums for some reason because I was getting trolled on Nintendo forums by someone calling me "green goblin", which was just awful.

I had no etiquette whatsoever (I swear just typing a bazillion words into topics over and over like some crazed monkey has taught me the vast majority of my proficiency in English) and there was a lot of LOL and holding down keys, but then, I was only just gone 14. I have never really lost my long ass style of posting with complex sequences of commas and sometimes even the ocassionally hyphen or semi-colon because, I guess that's just how I roll. Although recently with all the time I need to spend on my business these tend to resemble more lists with barely any sentence comprehension at all.

My first post/topic in December 2013 was about a dream I had (I still ocassionally post about my ridiculous vivid, lucid dreams) of a 3D Advance Wars. This eventually came to pass on GameCube as Batallion Wars so, I must be able to tell the future, but it was a quite different game (actually still meaning to pick it up).

Skip forward another 5 or so years and doing some stuff to help remove all the strawberry floating ads that dominated the place after Future decided it needed to capitalise on its online content, I suppose that got the attention of a few people that I knew a bit of HTML and CSS and so could potentially help out. Karl also got interested in this so we started collaborating to clean up the forum layout and make it wider and easier to read. We've since collab'd on loads of stuff, he's built some forum mods and helped re-skin our current responsive theme, and of course I brought him into the fold as we obviously needed a half decent dedicated server configuration and none of us really knew anything proper about Linux. I also posted relentlessly responding to almost everything in "Ask the Forum" as I always just had this need to solve problems, I was pretty depressed as a teenager so I suppose that helped me feel purposeful.

When GR mass migrated rather than merging with an altogether different community (Gamesradar US) I offered to host the forum, an offer that was declined as Steve and Garth has already sorted this out between them, but that put me in the mysterious "staff" group. Eventually we moved to a more reliable host on my advice (I can't remember exactly when I was given technician sort of responsibilities) but we're using way too much CPU so were pushed onto dedicated hosting which obviously costs more than a few quid, so, had to start getting some donations in. We decided to merge servers with the PCS community offshoot of here, so that we could run things like a Minecraft and Counter Strike server (which we did for quite a while but it was pretty heavy going, server-wise) and Mafro put his name down for that, then it moved to me while by this point Steve had vapourised almost completely, and well you probably know the rest.

Garth still sticks around, Karl hooked up with Orange Rakoon thinking maybe we should try sheltering some other left over Future Publishing web communities out there and I knew that Winckle needed to be given some love too because he was doing half the PC Supremacy crew stuff and also a bit of a Linux whiz. So I suppose that's the short version of what makes up the tiny little team we have at the minute keeping that pulse just about bubbling along.

Absolutely mental to think that I've been treading around the same sort of cyberspace for almost 18 years, all because I had some weird dream and decided to write about it to a bunch of strangers on the Internet who read the same website/magazines. That is, what, maximum fandom. Still happy I've been able to do what I can to stop "GR" rescinding into the mouldy depths/mists of the late 90s/00s Internet arch and honestly, it's a minor miracle the same domain name still loads after so long as that can't always be said for far, far bigger Internet publishing/outfits compared to a weird little indie forum!

Jesus, I remember the Nintendo.co.uk forum. That was the first forum I ever signed up to.

And I thought SONM was a hovel.

KK wrote:2002, just prior to the launch of Metal Gear Solid 2. The Daily Radar logo had started appearing in Future's magazines months earlier but I hadn't checked out the forum side of things until probably late 2001. This was when the board was segmented by platform (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube etc.)

I was banned briefly by Future for posting nude photos of Lorraine Kelly. I was allowed back on a TECHNICALITY (I had censored her nipples, therefore overcoming tyranny).

thats a fancy name for what those photos were for

Drumstick wrote:I joined in Feb 2004 to chat about NGC Magazine's now legendary I'm the Best competition. I was subsequently bestowed with the moniker F-Zero Wonder Boy due to my time trialling prowess.

What is especially cool is that, at one point or another, I've ended up meeting almost all of the ITB/Skill Club crew and they've all been sound people.

Sadly there's very few of us left on here now.

Just you me and Pellett, right? Shame.

I don't remember much from the early Edge forum move , which is when I came over here. I remember forum invasions though, they were cool.