This Is Super Embarrasing

Hey guys.

So, as far as I can tell, the last time I visited this forum I was 13. That was in 2005 (I'm 21 now). Now, nothing against 13 year-old, but thinking of myself at 13 sort of makes me want to cringe (so does thinking of myself at my current age, but for different reasons, at least). I'm pretty sure I had a giant, pretty blatant boy-crush on Crankeye (I came out as gay a few years later, but I'm pretty sure my love for Crankeye was purely aspirational... ) and was pretty much as annoying and naive as nerdy young boys with an Internet connection tend to be. And the fact that I'm still using basically the same password as I was nearly ten years ago (thus, how I was able to login with my same old username) for most of my social accounts probably says a lot about me.

So I return to these forums with a certain amount of shame attached to my name, but oh well. I wasn't sure where else to go.

See, I haven't been a part of the RPG Maker community in a long time. School and life got in the way, and I developed other interests, etc. I'm currently finishing up my undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, getting a degree in English Writing, but my sights for the future have returned me to game making.

I decided I wanted to reflect on my time with RPG Maker. I knew that I must have spent literally hundreds of hours playing around with it as a kid, had started several different projects between RM2k3 and RMXP, and I wanted to go over all of that and see just how much I had actually made.

To my horror, after searching several hard-drives and backup hard-drives from current and past PC's, I couldn't find a single product of my pre-teen efforts. The best I could find was a meager folder of about a dozen tilesets, and not even anything particularly interesting or that I had custom made. I couldn't even believe it. I know I must have had gigabytes worth of data dedicated to RPG Maker stuff, between project data and the various resources I hoarded and created myself. I can't accept that I would be so foolish to erase all that stuff, but if it's still intact somewhere, I don't know where.

I then turned to the internet. I was able to find my old Freewebs site (re:2005, 13 years old), and while it is still somewhat functional and provided at the very least a few laughs, it didn't have any of my RPG maker stuff stored locally since you only got like a 100 MBs for free back then (this was before the time of Dropbox and cloud storage, or even Rapidshare and Megaupload, really. Heck, it was barely the time of MySpace). I then remembered that there were a couple of sites way back when that hosted projects and other stuff to share, and there was even a link to one of my project pages on RPGI.net on my Freewebs site, but woe! The site has been offline for several years. I was able to find an cached version of my rpgi.net project page on web.archive.org, but, it's just text and HTML, all pictures and media are lost to the internet graveyard...

So I've come to the only other place I know (or could remember, I guess). Does anyone here still harken back to ye old days of 2005? It seems that Crankeye himself hasn't posted on these forums since at least last year, and I don't know/remember anyone who might have been active way back then. Basically, I'm looking to see if anyone might remember me, and happen to have, or know where else I might have posted some of my stuff. Alternatively, does anyone know who ran RPGI.net, and know where they might be contacted now? If there's an archive of that stuff somewhere?

I know it's unlikely that anything will come of this, but it can't hurt to ask. If you've even managed to read all this, kudos to you. At the very least, someone might remember and be able to laugh at me. If not, that's cool too. I'm mostly just amazed that this account still even exists and that I was able to access it. If nothing else of my RPG Maker days (years?) exists, at least there's still this.

For nostalgia's sake,
-David A. Van Etten (DVE)

EDIT: Also, is there any way to get into contact with Crank, or can one of the admins maybe refer him to this post for me?

Well hello there. You predate me so sorry I can't help, but I came around in 2008 and this:

I'm pretty sure I had a giant, pretty blatant boy-crush on Crankeye ... and was pretty much as annoying and naive as nerdy young boys with an Internet connection tend to be.

sounds like 90% of the guys who were here then, and most of them are still here now.   


Anywho, welcome back, wipe your feet, and enjoy your stay!

Welcome back!

I too have wished to find some evidence of previous attempts to create with RPG 2000 and 2003 but unfortunately, many computer hard drives have been ground into dust since those times.

Enjoy your time and getting back into creating!

Whatever you're not proud of, it's fine; we're all willing to forgive.

Welcome back!

What a post. o.o

Nice to meet you. I like your honesty.~

wow, a member older than I am on the forums I:

There's no archive here, to answer your question, our entire site should be searchable since we moved to rmrk.net. Anything that old that hasn't been backed up might be gone, lost in a maze of caches and waybackmachine years. ):

And crankeye still swings by and buys us pizza from time to time