Site History
You'd like to know something about the history of VGWS? It's a looooong story...
VGWS got it's start in late Summer/early Fall of 1997 as the Phantasy Star Saved Game Archive (PSSGA). The exact date has long been lost, as there seems to be no surviving records of when the PSSGA opened. The PSSGA was geared toward providing as many saved games for Sega's Phantasy Star series as possible. There was a large demand for saved games on a Phantasy Star forum around that time, as people were wanting saved games to replace saves they had lost while playing through the games. They didn't want saves from the ending of a game, though; they wanted saves from different points throughout the games so that they could finish playing from somewhere close to where they had been.
This prompted Tempest of Shadows to place a few that he had gathered while working on another project online. From there, the site grew to include other games in the series. When it eventually became clear that Phantasy Star saves would not fill the webspace provided by the account, the site was renamed the RPG Saved Game Archive (RPGSGA) and expanded to include saved games from other series as well.
Throughout 1998, Tempest of Shadows was also occasionally thinking it would be nice to have a unique, Phantasy Star-based counter for such a section of his personal website. So he began looking for both a free counter script and a place to host it (the server being used didn't support that sort of thing). Since getting a whole website account just to set up a counter for one website seemed sort of pointless, he decided he'd see about making it into a counter service. Response to the concept of a Phantasy Star Webpage Counter was favorable, so Tempest of Shadows got to work looking for what he needed.
After many, many months and hours of searching, both of these things were finally found. All that was left to do was make a website. Thus, on November 22, 1998, all was done, and the Phantasy Star Webpage Counter (PSWC) was opened to the public. For half a year or more, it provided counter services to 40+ Phantasy Star websites, including some of the most popular ones of that time frame. It grew to include nearly two dozen counter fonts. It was a resounding success, given the small number of Phantasy Star sites at the time, and that it served so many of them before it was half a year old.
Then one day, Tempest of Shadows realized that, like the PSSGA, the PSWC wasn't even scratching the surface of it's available webspace and that the limited focus of the Phantasy Star series was preventing the site from growing. The decision to expand was again an easy one, so April 10, 1999 saw the Video Game Webpage Counter (VGWC) open. Eventually the VGWS and PSWC were combined to make them easier to maintain.
April of 1999 was a good month for the counter, but it also had a bad event for the RPGSGA. A major server crash, one in a series of several frequent crashes, took the RPGSGA down for about a week and erased some files. Tempest of Shadows was annoyed and, thanks to some recent events of the time, and eventually moved the site. At this time the site also gained a co-maintainer, Zippy4251, and was again renamed (Saved Game Archive) and expanded to include more games.
In early 2000, it was time for another change. The VGWC was growing at a steady rate, and yet still suffering because of several downtimes at it's web host. The steady growth also meant that the site would eventually run out of space, which placed limits on it's life span. Since this was unacceptable, a new host for the VGWC was sought. Eventually, a host was found - Emulation World (which was also hosting the site hosting the Saved Game Archive). To make the VGWC more relevant to the type of content they hosted, it was decided that the VGWC and the SGA would be combined into Video Game Webpage Services (a name that was going to be applied to the VGWC shortly anyway). A domain name was acquired (that's another looooooong story), a new design was created, and the site was moved. On May 24, 2000, VGWS.com opened, and that brings us to here.
You were told it was a long story. ;)
