2003: I wanted to use a page builder to create a website for promoting my Manga. I was 13 and had big dreams! 🤣
I asked a friend for feedback about the layout. She said, that looks really bad. You should use HTML and CSS to customize the standard set of components. I thought: "HT-what? CS-who?"
At that time, I had no computer at home and maintained the website builder project at school. That's why I printed HTML and CSS tutorials to follow them on paper at home. The result was a table based website. So proud!
After summer vacation at school, I proudly presented my website to my classmate. He said: You used tables? "Dude, divs are the shit. And do you know PHP and MySQL? They can make you website DYNAMIC!"
He triggered me. At the same time, my older sister gave her computer to me, so I was able to research at home. Browsergames, O-Game, Browsergames. That's what I found everywhere. So I decided to program one to learn PHP and so on.
Well, where to start? I was lucky to find some motivated people I can team up with. They taught me a lot. And after several months of daily work after school, we published it.
The small browsergame (it's name was Underground-X) was a underground racing manager. We had 1048 users and an active board. It was so wonderful! Yes, it was the year of NFS Underground and Underground 2. So I decided to apply for an IT apprenticeship. At the first day, my teacher gave us a very exciting exercise: Program what ever you want with visual C++. We had one year for the development. My project was a client version of the game, which was my entry into programming. Wonderful memories.
Because we were young, we didn't know about versioning with git or subversion. So the "master" was on the production server and on our machines. We saved a database back up on the server.
One corrupt developer deleted everything from the server and contacted our server host. He said that we don't have a license for the Screenshots from NFS. Yes, we used Screenshots from EA's game. But we didn't monetize the game. That's why it wasn't a problem I thought. At the end, the worried host killed our server and database, killed the domain and told us to never contact them again. Wow... then there was a lot of chaos in our team and we stopped to work together.
Underground-X can be found in the web archive. underground-x.de was the domain.
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2003: I wanted to use a page builder to create a website for promoting my Manga. I was 13 and had big dreams! 🤣
I asked a friend for feedback about the layout. She said, that looks really bad. You should use HTML and CSS to customize the standard set of components. I thought: "HT-what? CS-who?"
At that time, I had no computer at home and maintained the website builder project at school. That's why I printed HTML and CSS tutorials to follow them on paper at home. The result was a table based website. So proud!
After summer vacation at school, I proudly presented my website to my classmate. He said: You used tables? "Dude, divs are the shit. And do you know PHP and MySQL? They can make you website DYNAMIC!"
He triggered me. At the same time, my older sister gave her computer to me, so I was able to research at home. Browsergames, O-Game, Browsergames. That's what I found everywhere. So I decided to program one to learn PHP and so on.
Well, where to start? I was lucky to find some motivated people I can team up with. They taught me a lot. And after several months of daily work after school, we published it.
The small browsergame (it's name was Underground-X) was a underground racing manager. We had 1048 users and an active board. It was so wonderful! Yes, it was the year of NFS Underground and Underground 2. So I decided to apply for an IT apprenticeship. At the first day, my teacher gave us a very exciting exercise: Program what ever you want with visual C++. We had one year for the development. My project was a client version of the game, which was my entry into programming. Wonderful memories.
That’s awesome, thanks for sharing! 🥳
Is the website from 2003 still live? I used to have a “home page” back then as a 13 year old and I’ve managed to find it using the Internet Archive
I like how your first game had more users than most startups out there! 😅
That's the sad part of the story I skipped.
Because we were young, we didn't know about versioning with git or subversion. So the "master" was on the production server and on our machines. We saved a database back up on the server.
One corrupt developer deleted everything from the server and contacted our server host. He said that we don't have a license for the Screenshots from NFS. Yes, we used Screenshots from EA's game. But we didn't monetize the game. That's why it wasn't a problem I thought. At the end, the worried host killed our server and database, killed the domain and told us to never contact them again. Wow... then there was a lot of chaos in our team and we stopped to work together.
Underground-X can be found in the web archive. underground-x.de was the domain.