Racketboy's 5 Year Mark Approaching

[racketboy]

Hooray.

I found racket through emuasylum's forums - which they keep asking me to come back to (I only made a handful of informed post on handheld gaming). I sent him my Pacman Vs idea after Momocon 07 and joined the forums soon after for the Retro Hacks book contest.

Yeah, that poor Pacman email sat in my inbox for a while before I just went and published it. That was probably one of the best moves I made as you've been such a help since!

[corn619]

This site is great. It can only get better as more fresh ideas and great articles are written.

[racketboy]

I remember when your blog went up. I didn't join the forums until just shy of 2 years later... but the forums weren't here from the get go (as commented).

Though I knew it was a while ago, jeez, I didn't know it was THAT long ago. Kinda creepy. I've been a member of retro gaming forums (with strong Sega themes) for nearly a decade now.

I do know why I joined. Racket was a member at SX with a link to his site in his siggy... and SX was basically in its final throws of life.

Yup -- good 'ol SegaXtreme.
Funny thing is, I think I still have more forum posts there than I do here. I was on there at work all the time. That's where I built a lot of my knowledge.

I may have told the story before, but what the heck...
I was jumping onto the RSS bandwagon back in the beginning of '04 -- its was such a great way of keeping up to date on news and such without having to visit the actual sites to see if something was new. I was a news posted (and moderator) on SX and I brought up the idea of having an RSS feed for the news section. It was kinda blown off, but I wanted to be able to have a feed available since there weren't any decent classic gaming sites out there with feeds yet.
So I started the blog on Blogspot as an easy way to have a feed. Having it detached from SX let me mention items that weren't Sega related (even though that was still my main interest).

I still hung around SX quite a bit as it still had a nice community at the time. I looked at my site as a simple supplement.

Subscribers slowly grew but I had a lot of fun with it. I remember I was one of the first people that posted some scans from Nintendo Power about the first Castlevania game on the DS and Kotaku or Joystiq linked to it. I had a nice boost then. And then once I had some good original posts, Digg got me a lot of exposure.

Soon after that, I moved to my own server and got a domain name to get some more credibility behind me and added the forum. Once the forum got rolling I didn't have much of a reason to visit SX that much.

A couple years ago after the site was really growing, Iceman2K (the owner of SegaXtreme) sent me an email asking if I would consider merging this site into SX. I tried to be real nice about it, but I obviously turned him down.

While I'm not really anything special, this place is essentially my baby and I've put countless hours into it and its nice having creative control over it. There was really no way I would hand it over to somebody else.

I don't even think I could put a dollar value on the place right now.

[andythebadass]

thank you racketboy for hosting this wonderful site. it has such a good group of members where everyone seems positive and very respectful. i really enjoy it! please keep up the good work!

you can thank good ole digg.com for getting me here. your write ups seem to always find their way onto digg which gets you thousands of hits. its awesome! thanks again!
-andy

[Reverend]

Here's for another 5 years

[miked]

I can remember ordering some back up saturn games from the man himself many years ago.........

[racketboy]

I can remember ordering some back up saturn games from the man himself many years ago.........

haha -- we don't speak of those now

[RadarScope1]

A couple years ago after the site was really growing, Iceman2K (the owner of SegaXtreme) sent me an email asking if I would consider merging this site into SX. I tried to be real nice about it, but I obviously turned him down.

While I'm not really anything special, this place is essentially my baby and I've put countless hours into it and its nice having creative control over it. There was really no way I would hand it over to somebody else.

I don't even think I could put a dollar value on the place right now.

Good move. I can't image the total man hours and forum time you've put into this. I wouldn't give up a thing like this for anything short of some Silicon Valley-type monies.

[Ack]

Well, I've only been here...a little under a year. I'd known about the site a little while before that, because Fastbilly would mention it from time to time when we'd be talking games. While I was always interested, I was also a bit busy with school and things and so I decided not to join. Eventually Fastbilly called me up about MomoCon 2008 and got me to go.

When I got there he introduced me to Racket, who was in Atlanta to do some work at MomoCon. After they'd done a panel together and we'd all ended up in the old-school video game room due to a tornado warning, I ended up playing a few rounds of X-Men vs. Street Fighter on the Sega Saturn with Racket. After that, he gave me an invitation to join.

So I did. About a month in, I started looking up fighting games for the Super Nintendo. The rest is history.

[CaptainWeasel]

Sheesh, I haven't even been here more than a few months and I love the place.

I remember seeing a few articles from here on Digg every once in a while, but I never bothered to check the rest of the site until I started collecting. It was a mistake to wait that long. This site is a wealth of information that will not be found anywhere else on the internet. I hope it's here for years to come. Good job, racketboy. You've made an excellent website.