Nerfbat Turns 2ish

Nerfbat has existed in blog form since 2 years ago today! The first real post was entitled State of the MMOG Industry: Part 0, in which I gave my thoughts on where the industry was at the time. I intended to follow that up with a new post each year, but got worried that I could get in trouble for doing so and didn’t bother. If you’re lucky, I’ll fire one up this year. My first post last year was A Final Farewell to AC2, bidding farewell to one of the first MMOs to die that I truly can say I enjoyed. Here’s to a good year for the industry, and feel free to read on for more sizzling information.

Technically speaking, Nerfbat has existed in some form since late 2003. A cataclysmic explosion of the database at that time, which I hadn’t bothered to back up, nuked all of my posts up until late January of 2004. Ye olde Wayback Machine has the old nerfbat (lowercase) in a half-decent condition still.

It also has a couple of my old articles, the Disclaimer (which made its way here), and Dawn: A Preview by Glitchless.. This entertaining piece was written back when people thought Dawn would be the “next big thing” in the genre, as was the Disclaimer.

They both existed at a site called “Can I be in beta?” Think back to the days of Horizons, when Dave Allen had us all entranced by his vision of a wildly competitive PvP game. That’s where that site spawned from (or, more specifically, it spawned from some of the community there), and where the “Gnome” idea came about (that is, calling people “Gnomes” instead of “Trolls” if they were idiots on message boards). CIBIB.com and CanIBeInBeta.com barely exist in any form, but you can go here to see the Grouchy Gnome I still use at times.

A few interesting stats for the blog:

• Posts: 158
• Comments: 1088
• Words written: 70256
• Words per day: 96
• Words per post: 436
• Longest post: 2018 words

So, happy birthday to the Nerfbat, and here’s to many more years of fun!