It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.

The fourth and last one for today is Rendelius, who is the founder and publisher of RPGDot and provides the means to make all of this happen. Without him there simply would not be an RPGDot.

100 unplayed games later
I recently calculated the time I have spent with the site over the last three years since I founded RPGDot in July 1999. Given that it was 4 hours a day searching news, writing them, contacting publishers and developers, answering mails fro readers, doing articles and keeping the site running, this sums up to app. 4380 hours.

This number itself doesn¹t tell me too much, so I tried to find something to illustrate what this means for my life:

If you assume that it takes 40 hours on average to finish a computer game, I could have played 110 additional games during this time. Would I have invested this time in making money, I could have bought John Romero's Ferrari with ease. Or I could have walked from my hometown to the other side of the world to meet my antipodes. In these 6 months of spare time I could have read hundreds of books, listened to 4000 albums or watched more than 2750 movies.

Instead, I spent the equivalent of a middle class car on programs, licenses, server fees and bandwidth. I stayed up a lot of nights due to technical problems with the site. I pestered developers and publishers alike to get features. And yes, all of this has been a lot of fun and rewarding.

The start of RPGDot
RPGDot started out as blinkingdot.com a small XOOM site for a game we wanted to write. It was an amateurish attempt to bring Angband into a 3D world, and we called it "Legends of the Seers". My responsibility was to create an engine that randomly calculated an island the size of Morrowind and despite my inferior programming knowledge I was able to finish the landscape engine creating 8100 square miles of credible landmass (there's still a demo version out there somewhere so if you search long enough you might find it).

In order to keep people looking at our project interested in our site, I decided to post RPG news there. We initially had 20 visitors a day, and I posted two or three newsbits every 24 hours.

Eventually, our team fell apart, and I was left with a useless site, useless apart from the RPG news there. At these days, RPGVault, RPGPlanet and GA-RPG ruled the world. There really was no need for yet another RPG news site, but nevertheless I carried on, since I had fun doing what I did.

I bought RPGDot.com as a domain and kept blinkingdot to host some small fan sites there. Late in 1999, I stumbled across a site by Sia Manzari, maintaining a very complete list of release dates. Ever in search for some content to add to RPGDot, I contacted Sia and asked him if he wanted to work with me. He agreed, and so Garrett joined RPGDot and helped me running the site.

Our growth was a slow one, but a healthy one. We didn¹t advertise RPGDot at all, our only advertising was the word of mouth that spread throghout the community. There was a new kid on the block, offering more complete news coverage than even the biggest corporate gaming sites for RPGs. Granted, our look and feel was still amateurish, and we had no database and a horrible layout, but I think our enthusiasm was felt and appreciated. We tried to cover the big players as well as smaller projects, and so we were for example about the only english speaking site spreading word about Gothic or Divine Divinity.

We were able to add great folks to the team, enthusiasts, dedicated people who donated their spare time to the project. And as the RPG fans took notice, so did developers and publishers. We received more and more material, found more and more doors open which I think is remarkable since we have no corporate power behind us, no print magazine or anything else.

Staying independent was our top priority after we had some bad experience with a network we joined. And I think this is the reason why we survived the dot com massacre the way we did. Our growth remained unbroken, and running our own server, we never were in danger to be shut down. Today, we handle more than a million pageviews a month, using app. 250 GB bandwidth and had to upgrade our server 3 over the last 12 months. I think I can say we are amongst the top sites for our genre by now, and we have great people flocking together here. Our forums are a nice place to stay, and we are
able to bring you more features than ever. Apart from RPGDot, we run sites for Gothic and Morrowind as well as Locus Inn, a site dedicated to the Infinity Engine games and Divine Divinity. As I write these lines, we are preparing a site for Neverwinter Nights, and we won't stop here.

Some statistics
Our biggest asset is our database. At the 1st of july, one year after we started with the database it contains the following:

641 games
213 comments on games
2975 game ratings
238 articles
9600 newsbits
2285 comments on news
191 information pages

88344 posts
10048 topics
2450 registered users

I think it is the best source worldwide to research a game. With over 600 CRPGs in our database now and some of them with more that 100 links to relevant articles, to their homepages, to screenshots and much more, you can't go wrong. No other site can offer you so much info on RPGs.

What's next
After these three years, where will we go now? Of course, we will try to improve wherever we can. But most important of all, I think we will develop from a news site to a community site at least this is what I envision. I want RPGDot to be a site where you don¹t just consume, but participate. Behind the scenes, we are already working on additional features. Three years from now, I see RPGDot as a site where a lot of people offer content, where you can get in contact with gamers like you, where people find
everything they are looking for regarding their gaming needs. We will try to bring together gamers, publishers and developers. This should be a home for all of them but still strictly independent from any of those. I have been in journalism for quite some time, and I know how money dictates content. Consider RPGDot as my personal endeavor to show that you can be successful without letting this happen.

I invite all of you to take part in this enterprise. Ultimately, RPGDot will be what you make of it. Ultimately, the crew of RPGDot just wants to be the tools for you.

I am really looking forward to the next three years.