by [VGN]AnarchY
Hello Gamers,
My name is Pat aka AnarchY owner of VGN. I will be one of the main people posting content for VGN so I figured I’d start off with a little run down about myself and my connection with Video Games. Some of you might have heard of me but mostly this post is for the new generation of gamer’s we expect to be flowing into this network as a result of new marketing campaigns and content we will be publishing in the future. I am the current owner of VGN and have decided to write up an article for everyone so they can get an idea of who I am and the history of this network. Hopefully after reading this introduction it will give old players and new players some insight on who and what VGN is as a whole.
It’s been some time since this Gaming Network has actually been put to good use. Its a relief actually reaching the point where I can start posting again. Since the death of Game Spy Industries in 2005 we have pretty much been lying dormant in the ashes of a once prospering community and Gaming League. With this new website and marketing techniques we hope to in a sense revive a piece of that once thriving community atmosphere and bring back not only a safe competitive atmosphere but something structured and rewarding which at one point used special to all gamer’s alike.
This is basically my history and how I remember things. There were different things that went down but I tried to cover most of the important stuff in this article. Currently I am a Web Developer and IT professional but it wasn’t always like this. Working with video games is my passion and what initially pushed me to learn basic HTML when I was very young. Below I will outline some of that story.
MY HISTORY
In 2001 at the age of 15 after two years of playing Rainbow Six on Mplayer I applied for a volunteer referee position at DML (Death Match League). At the time DML was the top independent gaming league that ran the original Best Selling Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six multiplayer community. DML ran the Player Ranking System, tournaments and at the time Cheat Detection was purely dependent on facilitating staff within the community.
Eventually in a few years after independent leagues began sprouting up in different places and in different communities. Over the course of 3 years I was Administrator for probably 3 of the main ones. Long story short I ended up becoming the owner of VGN which at the time was the top spots to play Rainbow Six. I only became owner after the original owners decided to retire. There was no other reason for them leaving except for the mere fact they had growing families, real life obligations or other things like careers or venturing off to different games or opportunities.
Looking back I like to believe that I was probably a perfect person to carry on the legacy as I was young, just starting out, never cheated, had dedicated years to serving the community and it was obvious that I loved the community. At the time VGN was hosting over 200 official matches daily and catered to around 500 active players with a 5,000 person player database that dated back to the initial launch of Rainbow Six. Today that would be comparable to about 500000 active players.
I have to believe that VGN Owner’s chose me to continue on their legacy because I put 110% into making the community the best it could be, I was a respected administrator within the community, not full of greed and would not put up with peoples bullshit. I would not hesitate to ban cheaters permanently and never took sides in any given dispute or situation. Not once have I ever cheated during an online video game and had strong moral beliefs when it came to fair gameplay. From the beginning I knew that there was something worth fighting for in regards to Competitive Online Multiplayer Match Play.
When I took over VGN I rebooted the community as some have done which in turn brought back original players and we once again had a growing community. We started hosting weekly events, cracked down on cheaters and basically cleaned all of the bad gamers out. Along with owning a website with an established community I had to learn basic code like HTML and a little PHP so I could at least keep the thing running. This is the first webpage I ever managed and developed. I had to pay software programmers to do updates for the anti-cheat software and had some other people to help me out when things got rough but for the most part I was on my own in regards to development. I had my head admins and supervisors to help with keeping the community in check but basically I had no choice but to learn how to make websites and code and manage databases using PHP, MYSQL , XHTML, CSS etc. Since then I have learned many different programming languages and now consider myself to be a professional in the field. I have many different websites and am absolutely capable of programming some software.
When MSN Gaming Zone shut its doors to hosting retail video games, this meant that all gamers who were playing on msn gaming zone came over to Gam Spy arcade which instantly doubled the communities size and I was owner of the league everyone played on in regards Rainbow Six. The zone leagues/anticheat owners and rivals of VGN tried to get all the players to retain their sites on Arcade but players were loyal to me and stayed on my network basically pushing the owner of the anti-cheat patch to partner with VGN.
Eventually I was recognized by Game Spy and was then made one of the youngest Tournament Directors on Game Spy network (I believe I was 16-17). I had to sign an IGN contract and everything. Not only that but VGN was allowed to run independent events officially using Game Spy and we worked out a system where we could give out official prizes through IGN. It was absolutely a cool thing for me. Being a tournament director for Powered by Game Spy games and administrating the official Game Spy ranking system “Arena” was a huge learning experience and taught me a lot about community structure and responsibility. I met a lot of people who had been doing it for a long time and had lots of experience in being hands on within an online Gaming Community. To this day you will still see this on my resume when I apply for jobs. Seems stupid or nerdy to some people maybe but when I was a teenager it felt really good to be a part of something like that and I devoted a lot of my time to it.
After about 2 years working with Game Spy I was put in charge of managing some major sponsored games such as Ghost Recon Advanced warfare, unreal tournament 3, empire at war, the original NBA2k, Age of Empires etc. Basically I was trusted to manage communities of big Game Development companies Game Spy worked with. If they wanted to host or promote their games they made. I was the one who would be running the tournaments and managing the ranking systems. Unfortunately by the time I had trained and achieved my status with Game Spy, IGN had nearly if not completely stopped all development and support for Game Spy Arcade, Arena and some other key services. It wouldn’t be long now that IGN would close down Game Spy completely and either shut down or merge all of Game Spy’s services into IGN.
This is a basic run down of my basic history with video games. Stay tuned for more articles. We have multiple things planned for this place including but not limited to some different software packages. We have multiple partners which we are sharing resources with and look forward to releasing more posts about these things and projects that VGN is currently working on. We might not have the best setup right now but it works and over time I expect all of this to evolve into something amazing! This time around things are structured a lot better and I have much more experience than I did before. Not only that we have amazing companies and people working with us to get this thing off the ground. Its going to be interesting to see what things begin to unfold for years to come. – Game on!
