Star Trek Gamers - The History
The STG was launched after the slow decline of the Star Trek Clan Directory
and Star Trek Mod Directory. The site itself is a culmination of 4 years of
online news and views on the Star Trek game world. The premise of the STG is to
have a single comprehensive site which servers the single solo gamers, clans and
the modders all in the same site.
What follows is a run down of the events leading up to the formation of the
STG, 2nd April, 2005
The Early Years - Clan Directory Sites - 1999 ~
2001
In early 2000 Activision released a game which would some close to knocking
off 25th anniversary as the top selling game of all time for the Star Trek
franchise, the game was Star Trek: Armada. Jennifer Venra, Katherine's late
sister, was in the old WON.net lobby playing the game with the old fleets of the
time. She joined AIF in August 2000 as the diplomat. She started having problems
finding other clan sites as there wasn't a single base site where the fleets
listed all there links, that when she came up with the idea of a clan directory.
Jennifer had some small homepages already open in 1999 for trek gaming but they
didn't get visited enough and they needed a redesign.
October 2nd 2000 seen the opening of Jennifer and Vic's Armada Site and Clan
List. The site was a simple 2 frame affair and was a small success. It listed
most of the fleets in the game and also had some small info on game tactics.
After a few months playing though her interest in Armada started to subside and
the old site was forgotten about. In February 2001 Jennifer was killed in a car
accident while travelling back from a joint birthday party with friends. The
news of her death quickly travelled through the world of trek gaming in Armada.
Her old site was in the process of being deleted when Vic noticed a new folder
with LCARS and HTML templates. The site itself wasn't finished but it became
obvious that Jennifer was working on something.
March 10th, 2001 seen the opening of the founder of this site you are looking
at. The Armada Clan Directory was the first site of its kind not only to list
clan sites for trek gaming, but to help clans out in recruiting in the game,
diplomacy and it even had a small selection of maps. Vic was the head of the
site, as he still is with this site and at the end of March beginning of April
Jennifer's sister joined, Katherine.
The next 2 months seen the opening of the Elite Force Clan Directory and
Dominion Wars Clan Directory. It started to become apparent that running 3
separate sites would be too much of a hassle, so, Vic merged the lot into the
Star Trek Clan Directory. Soon after sections for Klingon Academy, Birth of the
Federation and Starfleet Command opened.
The STDN - 2002
As the original Star Trek Clan Directory started to grow and gain more
recognition in the community Vic started to look to the world of modding. At the
end of 2001 he opened the 2nd of the old directory sites, the Star Trek Mod
Directory, moved to a new host courtesy of Stoner and stmod.com and proceeded to
expand the games that was covered by both of the sites.
2002 seen the opening of the Star Trek Gaming Directory which listed all the
PC Games, there info and support pages.
At the end of June 2002 Vic started the Star Trek Directory Network which was
supposed to be a front end portal for the hosted sites and the 3 major Directory
sites he had, the portal didn't take off.
The host of the network, stmod.com closed down, due to fraud regarding credit
cards. Spike took up the hosting of the site and we moved to our first dedicated
server.
The End Days - 2003
By the time 2003 rolled in we had moved again to sgnonline.com where we
stayed right up until 2005. STCD, STMD and STGD along
with the STDN had our own forum and a massive collection of clans and mod's
under our belt. However half way through 2003 the bomb was dropped...Activision
sued Viacom, ending trek gaming effectively for 2 years.
Between 2003 and 2005 over 3/4ths of the clans listed in the directory had
left trek gaming, something that Vic had tried to warn other people (including
Harry Lang) about, but they would not listen, or simply didn't care about the
fleet and clan world of trek gaming.
2003 seen the slow decline of the Star Trek Clan Directory and the rise of
the Star Trek Mod Directory as the top site out of the network, once more, Vic
decided to merge...
The STGD - 2004
January 10th, 2004 seen the entire network close down and reopen under one
site, the direct descendent of this site, the Star Trek Gamers Directory.
STGD held all of the content of the old network in one single site, the first
time any site in trek gaming had tried it, and STGD was an instant success. All
the way through 2004 up until November STGD worked in the modding community of
SFC 3 the effects of the efforts that was made by STG can still bee seen in the
massive selection of SFC 3 ships and mods this site holds.
However at the end of 2004 tensions between other sites towards the STGD
started to rise. More and more sites opened up and started copying content from
STGD, other former allies and partners of STG started
taking sides against the site and the people running the site. Vic broke ties
with all of the major trek game sites, causing one major news portal to
basically close down. A small war between sites started happening between people
who thought STGD was too old a site to be part of the community and the new
sites who had basically ripped off content from the STGD in the summer of 2004.
The STG - 2005
The beginning of 2005 seen a split in the community caused by the same sites
who said that they are for the community. STG was alone in a gaming site world
full of false hopes of the new MMORPG. Other sites criticised STG openly not
realising that without STG there own portal or sites wouldn't have been so
popular. Several staff was threatened personally via email and forums and one of
the largest community sites.
The split became permanent all the way through 2005.
March 2005 seen us leaving SGN and move onto GameSpy hosting (something else
which cause many arguments in other sites) and since
then we have been slowly building up ideas (which some sites have already
stolen) and the main site to enter 2005 and 2006 with a new look and more
content.
STG managed to last 2 months on GameSpy hosting until several factors made
GameSpy throw us off hosting on a technicality. It
costed the GameSpy Arcade players the STG sponsored GameSpy events which seen
STG give away free trek games to event winners.
On May 11th STG moved back to SGN under a split server deal which sea's STG
once more as a fast download location which far outstrips the poor support of
FilePlanet. On June 2005 the small difficulties between
STG and STGU was sorted out and both sites started to take part in STGU's
PodCasts. Then the next bomb was dropped...
At the end of 2005 SGN informed STG that they could no
longer support STG on there own server due to rising costs. STG was
without a host until Dan Perry of decorporation.org came along. He
promised the STG everything, but 2 weeks later he ripped off the STG and took
$80 of hosting and vanished. Then 3800hosting.com stepped in and we have
been with them ever since.
The beginning of 2006 see's Trek gaming recovering from
the days of 2004 and 2005, with 2 new games on the way this year the future for
trek gaming is looking good. 2007 then seen STGU once more blatantly rip
off this site by renaming their site's url to the same as this site, minus the r
in "gamers". Yet another shocking incident of the biggest theif in Star
Trek Gaming ripping off his ideas from another site.
This is the oldest, largest independent for Star
Trek Gaming, if you see any other site say that they are then they are simply
standing on the shoulders of giants.
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