• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

20 Years of NeoGAF coming up

I miss E3. E3's were always my most amusing times here.

Back when the forum had to close down Off-Topic for a few days to lighten the server load and at times it still wasn't enough to keep it from crashing.

J2GSkDd.gif

Still the #1 greatest moment in internet history:


I miss the E3 threads, my god those were a forum experience you'll never find anywhere else.

yup, E3 were the most fun time for sure back then.

 

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
It's been NeoGAF for 20 years. The forum that launched in 2004 was NeoGAF.

Before that was the Gaming Age Forums (GAF).
Not exactly. Was officially named NeoGAF in 2006, but was the NeoGAF generation of the forum from 2004 onward and called that informally to start with.
Boss, out of curiosity was the making of NeoGaf planned from the beginning during those EZ Board years or was it something that you did to simply keep GAF alive when the crash finally came? I can't quite recall but wasn't the board also suffering an attack at that time or am I mixing that up with a later event?
Long story, but basically we used EZBoards for three six-month periods during the nomadic age, and had to remake the board each time when the six months ran out, since that's as long as we could lock in the base price for usage rates (instead of it being impossible to pay for since I was a broke teenager). After that the terms changed and we migrated to another hosting setup, which eventually got destroyed via data corruption because we didn't have SSH access to do proper backups. That was 2004. I stepped up, raised a bit of cash from the community for proper hosting costs and a vbulletin license, and used it to launch what we know as NeoGAF over the course of one frantic week in the wake of the total database loss.
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
My 20 years on NeoGAF is coming up in a few weeks too.

This is probably a good place to ask, are the front page counters working correctly? Because the lurker number seems mental
 

Evolved1

make sure the pudding isn't too soggy but that just ruins everything
Maybe to celebrate we should bring back animated avatars.



Lol.
 
Really miss how GAF was buzzing back in the day. Its quieted down a bit now which is neat, but I still recall spectating epic ramblings and hype-induced behaviors by some former notable and notorious members over in the gaming section.
 
Last edited:

DragoonKain

Neighbours from Hell
I wasn't here since the beginning. Out of curiosity, when did the user base start to get really crazy? Or was it always that way? Thankfully most of them were purged eventually, but I'm curious if back in like say 2009 you'd get people calling you a Nazi for saying you liked Colin Moriarty.

Because I've browsed various internet forums for years and in my experience that didn't really start until 2013-2015ish. Probably coinciding with the rise of social media which rotted everyone's brains. Curious if that was the case here too.

The reason I'm curious is because most of my internet forum posting history has been on sports forums and not gaming forums and in my experience gaming forums have always been more out there than others in terms of personality types.
 
I wasn't here since the beginning. Out of curiosity, when did the user base start to get really crazy? Or was it always that way? Thankfully most of them were purged eventually, but I'm curious if back in like say 2009 you'd get people calling you a Nazi for saying you liked Colin Moriarty.

Because I've browsed various internet forums for years and in my experience that didn't really start until 2013-2015ish. Probably coinciding with the rise of social media which rotted everyone's brains. Curious if that was the case here too.

The reason I'm curious is because most of my internet forum posting history has been on sports forums and not gaming forums and in my experience gaming forums have always been more out there than others in terms of personality types.

In 2009? No but if you thinking about the beginnings of how bad things got then I'd say around 2012 is when the crazyness started to become noticeable.
 
I wasn't here since the beginning. Out of curiosity, when did the user base start to get really crazy? Or was it always that way? Thankfully most of them were purged eventually, but I'm curious if back in like say 2009 you'd get people calling you a Nazi for saying you liked Colin Moriarty.

Because I've browsed various internet forums for years and in my experience that didn't really start until 2013-2015ish. Probably coinciding with the rise of social media which rotted everyone's brains. Curious if that was the case here too.

The reason I'm curious is because most of my internet forum posting history has been on sports forums and not gaming forums and in my experience gaming forums have always been more out there than others in terms of personality types.
I don’t know specifics. Maybe the mods can give you better insight. But it seemed liked NEOGAF exploded somewhere in between 2009 and 2011. It became massive. In my mind it became in the heyday the second biggest gaming site to IGN.

What I call the “Trial of Pachter” , was a big deal. It was the first time I remember a pseudo celebrity creating an account to come on GAF and defend themselves And discuss their mindset on gaming. Pachter was far from the only one. Lots of Psuedo Celebrities had accounts on GAF.

Back then, imagine if you rolled Famiboards, REsetera, and GAF all into one site and did not have the competition from social media. It was truly a wild time.

Some people would get banned for different things, but as long as you were respectful, it seems the whole internet was more welcoming of conversation than it is now. This is almost a decade before outrage/cancel culture Emerged.
 

demon

I don't mean to alarm you but you have dogs on your face
This will forever be my 'coming of age' internet forum. Joined in 99 my freshman year of college which was also when I got broadband internet for the first time. I migrated back and forth between gaf and IGN during college but I stuck with this long term, mostly lurk now though. It's funny I'd always wondered how crazy it would be to still be on this forum 15-20 years later, a whole "lifetime" away and here I am. You young'uns will learn how fast time flies.

My favorite thread will forever be Fanta Shokata, back in like 02 or 03, pre-neogaf.

That and pretty much any olimario thread.
 
Last edited:

Trilobit

Member
Back when the forum had to close down Off-Topic for a few days to lighten the server load and at times it still wasn't enough to keep it from crashing.

J2GSkDd.gif

Oh man do I miss E3 and reading comments about it here. Did it for years when I was a lurker and didn't have a legit email.

E3 bear could have become an official maskot eventually if it was still around.

Aw4Jd7O.png
 
Top Bottom