Ten Years of Gaming Insanity
-David, webmaster DVGI

If you look through the news page archives, go down to the earliest archive from 2001, and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page you'll see the following entry:

1/31/2001 I finally got my Atari Lynx in the mail, long live eBay!  I was hoping to purchase one from United Game Source, but right when I decided to do it, they sold their last factory refurb.  So I won a Lynx off eBay, and after many headaches with the mail, it finally arrived.  It will probably be a surprise to many that I hadn't played a Lynx since I was eight. Work has been pretty quiet so I'm going to try to *gasp* put an update message on this page every day... or at least once a week.  Better get back to playing Paperboy on the Lynx, move over PlayStation2!

That really doesn't read like it's information that is kicking off a website but in fact that is the very first news update for David's Video Game Insanity.  It seems like a post out of the blue but that ramble above is how I began this site, now entering into its tenth year of continuous operation.

This is the David's Video Game Insanity ten year retrospective.

I had websites before, or webpages I guess one could say since they were hosted as part of the free hosting movement of the late 1990's.  Back in 1998 I was working on tossing together a webpage with information about some computer games I was working on with a friend.  At the same time I put up a small list of the video games I owned at the time so I would have an online record of what I had for trading purposes.  Shortly after getting that computer games page going I would begin to work on my webpage about the Japanese animated series Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon.  Anyone who was around then knows almost everyone had a Sailor Moon webpage in some capacity.  Well I put quite a bit of work into mine, Sailor Senshi Sanctuary, and it paid off in great friendships that continue to this day.  It really was a lot of fun to run a webpage that got so much traffic and had such an active chat community.

During the time of the Sailor Senshi Sanctuary I never ended my love of video games, if anything it continued to grow.  One day at the local flea market I picked up an Atari Jaguar and with a good relationship with the online game retailer United Game Source, I built up a small collection of Jaguar software.  Eventually I decided to write a few reviews and created a small webpage to host them.  I also moved my game lists over to the same webpage.  You could say the Jaguar site was my first venture into having a video game website but I like to think the game lists are where I first got going.  This is why a 1998 date is at the bottom of all my websites having to do with video games.  That was when I got the idea to do my own, even if it would take a few more years for it to really get moving.  However the Sailor Moon site is where I really put most of my efforts back then, the gaming site was an afterthought.

My original webhost for everything was Tripod, which was a great place for starters but had a 10 megabyte hosting limit.  These days websites sneeze 10MB but back then that was a decent mount of data.  Still, if you wanted to get big content wise that just wasn't enough space and for a site about Sailor Moon, something heavy in images and multimedia, 10MB wasn't going to cut it.  I actually used to have a dozen or so Tripod accounts to juggle the space I needed for Sailor Senshi Sanctuary.  I needed an alternate host that would allow me to have a single account for everything.  That host was Xoom, which offered unlimited hosting in exchange for a small advertisement bar to hang out at the top of the browser.  The advertisement bar was small and didn't mess with your webpages, it was a nice arrangement.  On July 31st, 1999 I moved the Sailor Senshi Sanctuary completely over to Xoom and folded most of my Tripod accounts.  I kept the old computer gaming site on Tripod as well as my page of Jaguar reviews and the game list.  The divide between the two sites was growing even more and the gaming related stuff would be untouched for months while I continued to work on my big, newly expanded Sailor Senshi Sanctuary.

At the close of the 20th Century the free website hosting model was beginning to fall apart.  Xoom wasn't immune to this either and eventually they became NBCi but the hosting standard didn't change any.  Sailor Senshi Sanctuary was doing well and was getting to a point where I wasn't constantly adding to it so I went back to the idea of doing a gaming site.  I didn't go back to the Jaguar site and expand it but rather I created a new NBCi account and ported over my game lists, which were terribly out of date at the time.  Somewhere around that time I lost the Tripod account with all the Jaguar reviews, I can't remember what happened but I do know they disappeared in the shuffle.  In late 2000 I came up with the name David's Video Game Insanity and got to work on creation of the site.  I based the design off what I had done for Sailor Senshi Sanctuary but made the over all look much cleaner and less cluttered.  Although there was a new name for the site, it really only consisted of my game lists, which were now broken down into separate pages by console.  Really the site was just my game lists and a news page that I treated as a bit of a blog.  That's why that first news entry from January 31st, 2001 seems so random, it was just a little blurb about what happened that day.  I wasn't doing much with David's Video Game Insanity but things would change very shortly and I never even saw it coming.

July 18th, 2001 was the two year anniversary of Sailor Senshi Sanctuary.  Two days later the site would disappear.  NBCi discontinued its webpage hosting service out of the blue without any notification that they would be doing so.  I was able to save my backups of Sailor Senshi Sanctuary but the site was dead.  David's Video Game Insanity was also dead as well but that wasn't as a big a deal to me as the Sailor Moon site.  It was a desperate few days there, I'll tell you.  I archived Sailor Senshi Sanctuary offline and would make multiple attempts to get it back online over the years, including attempting to truncate it down under 20MB, all which would fail.  Years later it would finally return but here is where the story of David's Video Game Insanity takes on a life of its own.  See, DVGI was a fairly small site, well within the size limitations of the old Tripod accounts.  So I created a new Tripod account for DVGI and moved the site over there.  I worked like crazy for a week straight and the August 1st, 2001 news update at DVGI spelled it all out - I'd be writing reviews and information in addition to just listing the games that I had.

Things would continue like this until August of 2003 when Tripod would change how it would serve advertisement on its free pages.  This broke the frames based design of David's Video Game Insanity and again the site went offline.  I would continue to work on the site while offline but I realized that if I wanted to make sure my sites would last, I would need to pony up for my own hosting.  I did that in July of 2004, creating classicplastic.net and one day later on July 11th, David's Video Game Insanity would return as its primary component.

Born from an idea in 1998, created as an oddity in 2000, given first real spark in 2001 - by 2004 DVGI had finally become what it is known as today.

A lot would transpire over the years between then and now.  Jobs would come and go, I would relocate back to Silicon Valley, there would be some trying personal times in 2005 but the site has continued to push on.  Content has slowly been added although looking back after ten years you'd expect that I'd have more.  I hope to add more over the next year.  I've worked on other projects during the time when DVGI was prime, heck even Sailor Senshi Sanctuary was finally restored in 2010.  DVGI stands at the top though, it really is the part of my site that I think of as being the most important, the flagship of the content I create.

For the past few years not a lot has changed.  The game lists continue to get updated.  A new game or peripheral review shows up every now and then.  Occasionally I'll provide a repair or modification tutorial.  That's how I like it though - calm.  I don't have to worry about everything disappearing out of nowhere one day.  I know I can add content at my own pace.  I'm not trying to please anyone but myself.  It's a nice feeling and why I think I've been doing this for ten years.  Being more active where the action is with classic gaming is re-igniting my fire when it comes to writing about the industry.

The ten year milestone is a spectacular one to me.  Yeah, ten years has passed for Sailor Senshi Sanctuary and that old computer games site that started the whole thing but with both of those I was fairly inactive.  With DVGI, even when it was down, I wanted it back up because I always had new content.  It wasn't about getting it back online to have it online, it was about getting it back online to share content I had.  I'm looking forward to generating new content from now on, being excited about adding to the site and continuing to allow it to grow.

Lastly I want to say a thank you to everyone who has ever visited one of my webpages, past or present.  Double thanks to anyone who has contacted me via e-mail.  Knowing that my views and comments are making enough of a difference in someone's day to the point where they take time to let me know has always been the most rewarding part of this adventure.  I do attempt to reply to every legitimate piece of e-mail I receive, it may take a couple months, but I reply to them all.

It's been a solid ten years and there's still so much more to do.  Thanks again!
 
 

Here are a few graphics and pictures from the history of David's Video Game Insanity!!

Written on 01-30-11 by David, insanedavid@classicplastic.net

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