I’m new to collecting retro stuff, and as such I’m also new to retro forums. In Dec 2017, I pulled out some old retro consoles that I had kept since I was a kid (Master System, GameBoy Advance, Game Gear, Original XBOX, GameCube), and made the decision to actively collect some other stuff. I found a good CRT on kijiji and set myself up a nice little retro area in my basement, and hit the ground running!
This is literally the first retro forum I felt was a good fit for me, and I signed up immediately. I later learned that the forum is just over 100 days old, and the vets here talk about the old forums and how bad they were.
What’s the history? What was the reason for the closure or the mass exodus from the old site?
The article that Fuzzy posted is a good recap. To provide a bit more context: Peltz, the creator of Retro Game Boards, along with myself, the other mods, and many of the users of RGB were all regular posters in many of the Retro themed threads on NeoGAF. For myself, and many others, it was these threads, plus maybe a few other community based threads, that kept us coming back to that forum.
When everything happened as described in the article linked above, a bunch of us wanted to keep the spirit alive of those Retro themed discussion threads, and Retro Game Boards was born. We;re not the only board that sprang out of NeoGAF, and many articles you’ll find have more information about ResetERA and other communities that sprang up. However, I feel RGB serves the needs of our little “RetroGAF” community really well, and we’re happy to see new members like yourself joining the fold!
Feel free to discuss this migration all you’d like, but please everyone remember that RGB is an all inclusive place, and as a moderator, I’d like to limit personal attacks, accusations, or any sort of mud-slinging at anyone that unfortunately became all to common to the old board. Thanks everyone!
@BTails and @Fuzzy summed it up perfectly. Somehow we ended up with a really great group of people on the old board and we just wanted to keep the crew together. Before we had to “hide” in catch all threads because retro was a very small part of neogaf. We decided we should have a home where you can freely post about retro and not have to worry about it being instantly buried !
Got it, thanks for the article link and the quick run-down.
It’s pretty indicative about the importance of the #metoo movement, when it seemingly has an unlimited amount of women coming forward from all walks of life.
I hope this place continues as it looks now. Seems to be a really great community here, and I’m glad I got in early!
And honestly, even without the “event” that happened on gaf that caused the great migration, the retro game community was always a bit separate and didn’t get drawn into the standard going ons of the forums at large. So we transferred easily to our own offshoot that still acts about the same as we did there.
We were cast from our home by the great cataclysm of NeoGAF and destined to wonder the deserts of the internet. After about 2 days of blind wondering we found an oasis in a discord server, and a few brave souls among us said “screw this, we’re starting OUR OWN forums”.
Yea, we really got this place up and running in a hurry. In fact, we didn’t even have a logo because I haphazardly hired a graphic artist who, as someone thankfully pointed out, plagiarized the original proposed logo. So it had to be scrapped.
So we decided to launch immediately anyway and I made a temporary logo in Mario Paint after about 10 minutes of working on it (no joke). Good times.
Now here we are, looking all official and everything (thanks in part to New002’s beautiful logo design).
I always had a bookmark of my subscribed GAF threads. Most were the retro threads. So my version of GAF just looked a lot like what we see now here. Only it’s way better now.
I always felt like we were like one of the colonies in Battlestar Galactica, ejected violently from our home planet and saved by the life raft of Discord. Now we have a new home planet, and all is well…
The retro threads on NeoGaf were great but as others said they got buried in all the clutter of all the other million odd threads and it ticked me off that we always got relegated to the Community boards. Retro Gaming Boards is so much better, so much freedom and ease of use and all without the negativity and (eventually) overall gross feel of NeoGaf.
It never really bothered me since all the normal members had them all subbed anyway, other then the fact that it was harder to get new people into the group. But that kind of invisibility to the general public also made it so we were more lax and separated from the general herpaderps of the rest of the forum. Still sad when people complaining about how Missile formatted his posts got him temp banned. :c
Yeah, the retro threads themselves were nice, self contained havens at least, I had mostly stopped posting on gaming side at that point. Outside of the retro threads I was barely bothering to look at Neo Gaf in the last year leading up the the forum’s implosion as I was getting the majority of my modern console news from the people I follow on my Twitter gaming feed. I’m not familiar with what happened with Missile and why his post format would be an issue.
By the way, wow, GAF is a wasteland now. A hot topic gets a couple pages there now where on ResetEra there are thousands of posts. Just look at the two Mario Odyssey threads as a good example. The game came out the week of the meltdown, and is a huge release, so it’s a nice little experiment.
I am now on Reset a lot but I’m REALLY glad this forum exists now.
I really need to start going there but have just taken the big change as an opportunity to get actual shit done instead of browsing a forum for 3 hours a day. I feel I should at least refresh the main board to see what news stories are going on.
I remember people saying
that he posted
from a unix terminal
or something similar
I wonder if that was actually true?
The guy
Knew his stuff
thats for sure