TRM's-history TRM (Dave)
I had obtained access to the Internet in 1996. Among the early sites I visited were the NES Flashback and |tsr's NES Archive. By 1999 I was ready to attempt website design myself, and my topic of choice was the original Nintendo Entertainment System. My choice to dedicate a website to the NES was a quite obvious decision for me; I had been playing the gray box since I was three years old.

A boring day in 1999 I signed up for a free Angelfire account, and I left my html coding do the rest. There was only one problem though --- I had no experience with coding websites. After working for a few hours with a free html guide, I managed to get a few paragraphs of text to appear on my website. I still had trouble getting pictures to display; I kept getting the notorious "Red X." The next day, I went into school and I asked my friend Jon to ask his brother Rob about images. Rob had designed a few websites, so he would certainly know about images. Rob set me straight on the images and I was ready to crank out a super awesome website.or so I thought.

Without any Photoshop skills, emulator skills, or a scanner, I was very limited to the pictures which I could use. My friend Jon borrowed a few of my magazines and scanned a few images for me (box scans of Hard Drivin' and Xybots by Tengen) but that was it. I grabbed a few pictures off of various other sites and eBay auctions, and I was on the road again.

It seemed that as soon as I solved some problems, others would quickly find me. After writing a few shoddy articles, I quickly ran into more trouble. My first major problem was space limitations. I ran out of free space on my free Angelfire account. This quickly put The Warp Zone on hold. My other problem came in the form of another website author, Martin Nielsen.

I originally started off visiting messageboards such as |tsr's NES Pit. Once it died, I moved onto the newly founded NES World messageboard. I posted a message for the webmaster, Martin, telling him that I had a few box scans that he might want to use for his website, Hard Drivin' and Xybots. All I wanted was for my site to receive credit for the scans and for Martin to link to my website. Things did not happen this way though. Martin complains at me for using a few of his images, without crediting him, and he demanded that I remove them from my page immediately. I removed the images, but the funny thing was this: I did credit Martin for the images; there was a note about the images on my "Legal Stuff" page. Due to this bad run-in and the lack of space, I stopped the project.

In 2000 I was going through some emotional problems. For instance, my grandfather was really sick and he then passed away. To try to get my mind off of the pain, I decided to dust out my notes and make another attempt at website design.

This time I decided to construct a website dedicated to Shadowgate, a semi-popular cult classic of sorts. I designed the website over the course of a few months, and it got to be fairly popular. I wasn't quite happy with the site though. The design was not that good, and I was disappointed by the number of visitors which the site received. I finally gave the site away to a friend of mine, Hugues Johnson. He redesigned the website, and still maintains it to this day.

By this time, website design became an addiction of sorts. I decided that I would redesign my old website, The Warp Zone. I gathered a lot of good information for my site, many exclusive interviews and pictures. I then wrote up articles and began to construct the individual pages. Once again, I had problems. I could not find a free host which provided me with unlimited website space. I eventually found one, Seal Team Six, and I decided to post my site on their host.

Too bad for me, Seal Team Six turned out to be very unreliable. I did not have backups of my site on my hard drive, and they deleted my whole account for some reason. I still do not know which term of service I broke. That day was a sad day for me, and I was not too happy about the matter. I thought about dropping the project, once again, but I just couldn't do it. I rewrote the articles, found another host, and then quickly applied for a space at Classicgaming.

Classicgaming would be the site of The Warp Zone until Gamespy contacted me and told me that they felt my site would be better part of the PlanetNintendo division. This really wasn't much of a problem for me; I took the news coolly and moved my site over to PlanetNintendo, where it resides today.

By now I've taken on a few other sites, hosting NES Flashback and NES Achievers for my friend Nick M. Nick also contributes and helps me out a lot with my site; he really should get paid for his work. Who knows ;) I also host some comics for a personal friend of mine, Brandon Slicker.

It's been a good five years since I first started The Warp Zone. Over the years, I learned many things about designing good websites. For instance, the actual design of the site is not too important; the quality of the content is what most people look at. Another thing to keep in mind is to keep good relationships with the other people in your hobby. Simple things such as the common courtesies (please and thank you) go a long way, you would be surprised. I've made my share of enemies (or should I say rivals?) while running this site, but my overall idea is to have fun and inform people at the same time. Which was what we wanted.

~~NGD's-history
It is kinda strange how I became the webmaster on the WarpZone. I emailed TRM asking him about some Wisdom Tree variant, Bible Adventures I think, and he mentioned not having enough time to work on the site, and even mentioned shuting it down. After a few emails, I agreed to take it over, even with my very limited knowledge of HTML coding. Not to much is going to change, for quite a while at least. I may eventually redo the layout, but that will be down the road. Same site, but a new name and a new webmaster. I think TRM's last paragraph says it best, "the overall idea is to have fun and inform people at the same time. Take Care ~~NGD