The History of Wildcat Online

UPDATED: 5/26/2012

I don’t really know if anyone’s interested in the subject, but perhaps some of you who have wandered onto LVLs. have wondered where this blog came from.  Well, here’s a more thorough summary of its life for anyone curious.

I graduated from high school in 2001.  Shortly afterwards, my grandfather gave me $1000 as a graduation gift.  It was really something else to hold $1000.  I knew what I wanted to spend it on: a computer.  I wanted to continue my multimedia studies, and also felt that I needed to get involved online in the few forums that I had discovered awesome fan art on (Shoryuken.com, in particular).  Once we returned home from Utah (where my grandparents live), I rushed out to Circuit City and looked around.  Even $1000 was too little to get a really nice PC at the time.  My mom was kind enough to lend me $200 + tax to get one of the former store display PC’s.  I was really happy.  Finally, I had a computer of my own!

Turns out my computer had a web builder called Trellix on it.  So, after some experimenting with it, I planned to plop a website on Tripod called…Wildcat Online.  Extrordinarily creative, I know.  In case you’ve ever been pondering where my name came from, I chose the web moniker Wildcat for two reasons.  One was that I’ve always liked wildcats/bobcats.  My elementary school had them as a mascot, and somehow or another I grew fond of them.  Secondly, I had used it as my game company name.  I spent a lot of time working on game designs in my youth/teenager years (I’m still working on them, but on a much less frequent basis), and they were created by Wildcat Gaming Design.  If I ever do get a game done, I’ll probably still be calling my company that.

On August 6th, 2001, Wildcat Online went live.  It hosted my own art, Street Fighter images I had gathered, a Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 fan design, and a few other things I can’t recall.  Alas, the Internet Archive for my site only goes as far back as 2002, so I can’t really go into any more detail about my original site.  My February 8th, 2002 update reveals that I was hosting fan art I adored, had a wallpaper section, had more than just Street Fighter art going, and that I was working on a Miwa Oshiro shrine.  Heh.  I’ve changed a lot since those days.  The only crush I have now is my lovely wife.  But, at the time, I did not know her, and think that having a shrine for some Asian bikini model would be appropriate, given my meager age of 19.  As embarrassing as it is to think back to those days, it’s still a part of the site’s history.

Apparently I didn’t work on the site much in 2002, since the later update for that month is the same.  However, 2003′s first update on October 4th reveals a big change in the site’s direction.  The (then) trademark orange text is there, I’ve got links to Neomega.net and The Lounge (which I’ll get into the stories behind those momentarily), Miwa’s gone, but Love Hina art has replaced it, my webcomic Snow Dragon, based on college bands formed of my favorite original characters, is up and running, and the earliest foundations of this blog are set with a rudimentary games section.  Shame most of the link buttons don’t work now.

Neomega.net was the other catalyst into the creation of this blog.  It was created by andyrose, a former TNL’er* who was tired of the direction TNL was heading towards (*= TNL is The Next Level, a massively popular gaming site.  I was there in its infancy, and enjoyed my time there early on.  I was even a mod there for a short period of time.  As time progressed, the site’s overall vibe became more hostile and bitter, so that’s the “direction” I’m referring to).  Several other TNL’ers felt the same way (myself included), and we decided to forge our own path using andyrose’s domain.  He originally was creating a RPG called Neomega, but he abandoned the project and created a gaming site using the same name.  We had a strong staff, strong opinions, and strong friendships.  It was a marvelous time while it lasted.  However, Neomega would not last.  andyrose couldn’t keep up with the monthly fees to keep the site afloat, so it had to shut down for good around June 14, 2004.  I left the memorial notice on the front page (one nice thing about using the same name everywhere you go).  Unfortunately, the staff good-byes have been lost to internet oblivion.  But the ride was well worth my time.  When Neomega died, some of the staff tried to create a new site, Quarter-Turn, which didn’t last for too long either.  After QT’s end, I decided to forge ahead on my own and create my own website for games.  I founded Lvl. sometime in 2006 to carry on my passion for gaming.

But anyway!  Let’s step back a bit before skipping ahead too much more.  My last update from 2003 mentions an overall Art Gallery, which would eventually become the Imagery section.  Snow Dragon was defunct at this time, but it did come back, along with a new webcomic based on one of my favorite character designs I’ve ever made…but I’ll get to that down the road.

2004 brought a new site design to Wildcat Online.  It also reveals that I’ve hosted the Skies of Arcadia gallery for the first time, which would become a major facet of the site’s heritage.  During the summer, I redid the site’s design again, and this one stuck until Lvl. took over the whole site in 2008.  My art was taking more of a presence with fan art returning to the site (which had been down since its early creation), and I had expanded the Snow Dragon and Games sections into sub-sites, an important evolution.  This is also the first update featuring my memorandum to Neomega, which would remain a part of Wildcat Online’s front page until its very last update.  That message now sits in the About LVLs. page, because Neomega continues to be a major influence upon me, several years after its demise.  It would appear that the Love Hina shrine dropped off in 2004.  I think I had just grown tired of the series at that point, so I was ready to move onto other things.  2004 also was an important year for non-internet related reasons – I started going out with Grace in April of that year.

2004 also marked the end of the front page link for the Lounge.  Let me explain the situation with that webcomic.  I was involved with the Lounge’s earliest days, for about 2 years.  I am indeed the Wildcat in John Joseco’s thank yous, and I am also still featured in the comic as Jerry, the arcade manager.  John and I had a very strong friendship in the early days of my internet life.  However, I have to admit that both the comic’s switch into more dramatic stories did not interest me as much as John’s comedic beginnings, as well as a few events that I’d rather not get into here, made me decide to back out of the comic as a contributor of ideas.  From last I checked, the Lounge is about to run its course, and I wish John the best with his future endeavors.

There isn’t a solid update on the Internet Archive for 2005, alas.  I can guess way.  2005 was the year that Grace and I got engaged, and later moved out into our own place.  There was a long gap that we did not have a phone or internet access, until March of 2006, if I remember right.  So, naturally, the site remained in limbo during a six-month period.  That didn’t mean I wasn’t working on the site, though.  Once our connection was put in, I resumed updating the site.

My next posted update falls on June 27, 2006, and shows many changes.  Lvl., as I mentioned above, began in 2006, and The Adventures of Shi Kurai and Friends, my second webcomic, was going strong by this point.  Let’s segway for a bit and discuss my two webcomics and their motivations for being created.  Snow Dragon was a continuation of my comics I made when I was much younger, but I updated many of those old characters to be college-aged.  I decided that I’d set up several bands, as I had developed a habit of writing songs in my spare time at college, so I used some of those to supply the bands something to sing.  I also got to further my character’s personalities and relationships, which was very rewarding.  It was a lot of fun, but I never could get myself into a constant rhythm of updating it regularly, and the Tripod size limit was always a struggle.  And then there were times that I felt the overwhelming need to do a comic, despite not really being into drawing at that moment…so I occasionally said screw it and put the whole project on hiatus.  After a bit, I’d get the desire to work on it some more, so I’d redraw the whole cast, update their bios, and then plug away into a few more comics before hitting that snag again.  As for Shi Kurai’s comic, Shi is one of my absolute favorite designs.  She’s so much fun to write in a story I’m working on, and drawing her is always a delight, too.  So I thought I could spearhead a comic featuring her uniting with some of my other characters in an attempt to solve some sort of mysterious abduction, all the while bouncing the incompatible personalities off of each other at the same time.  It also was an attempt to work on my Paint Shop Pro skills, since many of them had special “abilities,” like Shi’s Mirages.  However, the same problem occurred…I hit a creative snag, but this time it had twice the effect, since I was also doing Snow Dragon comics at the same time.  So, I put Shi’s story to rest.

We’ll return to the comics in a moment.  2007 was rather uneventful in the grand scheme of the site.  The Imagery section gained two new games as its flagship galleries – Beyond Good & Evil and Hotel Dusk: Room 215, both of which continue to be on the blog today.  I did have a Tales of Symphonia gallery up for quite some time, but unlike the other three galleries, I felt that some other fan sites had done a finer job with their ToS art displays, so I took it off of the site for that reason (it’s back on LVLs. now, though).  Wallpapers were another big part of the site’s history, but they too bit the bullet as size constrictions raised their ugly head.  Tripod’s 20 MB limit was maddening.  I wanted to do so much more with the sites, but by the time 2007 had rolled around, Trellix had been bought out twice over, and they had stripped their “create a new website” link off of the web, forbidding me access to additional Tripod sites.  Six years of 40 MB of space were getting near the end of my patience, and 2009 would be where the line was finally drawn.

Before that point, though, I did one final redesign to Wildcat Online, the most radical of all of its changes.  My subbranch Lvl. had quickly become the focus of the site by that time, and it felt silly to keep it that way.  So I discarded Wildcat Online as the site’s headliner and Lvl. took office.  Along with the expanded gaming coverage, I asked a good forum friend of mine, Nester from NinDB, to join me as a staffer.  He agreed, and remains a vital part of LVLs. as its Editor.  However, a major problem had begun.  Grace and I had gotten a new PC from my parent’s for Christmas of 2007, and Trellix was not compatible with it.  So I had to boot up the “old computer”, as we call it, to work on Lvl.  And it got irritating quickly.  The new PC was fast, booted up quickly, and surfed the net quicker.  It took 10 minutes for the oldie to boot up, the program was slow, and Trellix had grown more glitchy as time went on, and updating the site was a chore of aggravation thanks to the program errors that commonly would derail my uploads.  It also was taking up space in the house, and the aforementioned size limits reached its climax as I took down the Gifts gallery for the first time in the site’s history for a massive Skies of Arcadia art update.  I knew at that point that something needed to be done.  I needed a way to work on my site on the new computer.

Oddly enough, I Can Has Cheezburger? provided the answer.  I love LOLcats, and in between the chuckles I noticed that they were a blog powered by WordPress.  Got-Next, another cast-off from TNL, had used it to power their blog (before re-merging with TNL), and I had enjoyed the way it worked when I posted some entries there.  So I did some further research and ultimately decided that it would be the perfect answer for my website problem.  And so, LVLs. was born on May 9th, 2009.  Early on it was a hustle for Nester and I to relocate the majority of the content we had done on Lvl., but once the transfer was complete, we began working on new material and expanded our coverage to include news, game music, and topics outside the range of gaming.  The newfound freedom certainly pushed me to think of new concepts and features to run, and I think Nester felt the same.  During this early transitional phase we experimented with what LVLs. could do for us, and, after a bit, I think we found our voice…one that I’m pleased to be providing an outlet for.  We also grew in terms of authors.  TEi, a NinDB friend who loves to write, agreed to come onto the staff and kick out some awesome articles (including one of the most popular posts we’ve made with his Last Airbender opinion!), and I am certainly glad to have him here.  Grace, my lovely wife, also became part of the team, but as she is a current cultural anthropology student, her spare time is sparse.  She definitely gives me some massive support off the web, though.

In 2010, I officially retired Snow Dragon.  I felt that it was time for me to let the old project rest in peace, and move on to something new and exciting.  I began So…this webcomic on a lark, and so far, it’s been going pretty well.  I’ve also had some exposure to the site courtesy of GoNintendo, whose admin Rawmeat Cowboy has been courteous enough to take some of my Tunage (more on that in a sec) articles and help me share them with a wider audience.  No words can express my gratitude…but a extremely big thank you is as close as I can get.  It’s been a rather exciting time seeing my stats so affected by people curious about these composers, and I hope that they stick around and check out other parts of the site.  I also began a second blog in December for the Limited Editions Club and the Heritage Press, and that’s been a fun side-project for me to do.  2010 also marked the launch of Tunage, created in part due to the Kinuyo Yamashita Wikipedia blunder (in short,Yamashita is the composer of Castlevania and other games, but apparently isn’t “notable” enough to have her ow Wikipedia page) to give composers a home where people can discover them and their music.  While I mostly focus on “obscure” composers (who lack a Wikipedia home), a few big names have made an appearance as well.  As an aside, I need to get back to doing these.  They’re time-consuming and occasionally frustrating (due to Youtube copyright restrictions), but I do feel very satisfied once I finish one and know that that composer will get a little more noticed thanks to my work.

2011 has been a big year thus far, with our hit statistics climbing higher and higher per month (as of this writing – hopefully it doesn’t taper off!).  We added to our staff in May, with Hardcore Gaming 101 forum members Jason X and Camabyte joining our ranks.  I’m looking forward to what they bring to the site.  Also, we launched a forum in May as well, which is slow-going as of right now. Maybe someday it’ll pick up. Probably would help by posting there more myself. :p

2012 thus far has seen a few changes. TEi has officially retired from the blog, which was a bit of sad news. However, it was more than amiable and I wish him the best in his future endeavors. I went back to school, which forced me to pull back a little from the blog. I hope to make that up a bit this summer. Camabyte, while wanting to contribute, hasn’t been able to get any posts done. So Jason and Nester have been wonderful in picking up some of the slack from those issues. LVLs. continues to get more and more hits as we roll along, which is amazing and humbling.

Since joining WordPress, LVLs. has been a major facet of my life.  It’s one of my favorite things to work on.  I have immensely enjoyed coming up with new feature topics since I’ve relocated, like Cultural Anxiety, Tunage, Song Highlights, Virtual Console No-Shows and Artistic Discussion.  I think we have a dynamic and awesome staff that have strong, interesting and unique points to make on many topics (gaming is still the primary focus), and LVLs. would not be the site I adore without my friend’s contributions.  So thanks for being a part of this place.

Thanks for making your way through our history here at LVLs.  I hope you remain with us as we continue on our path.