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Anonymous asked:
How did you first come across vgmdb
Short answer
I just happened to be part of the VGM community of the forum where the project began!
Too long answer, going into some site history that’s not super well documented publicly
There used to be[1] a forum called Gamingforce (GFF) which 20+ years ago happened to be one of the more active hubs for VGM discussion on the internet. I initially joined the forum in either late 2004 or early 2005 because I needed to register an account to download some definitely legal sheet music, and later started participating in earnest after discovering the Song of the Week contest for VGM and VGM-adjacent music when it was highlighted on Larry Oji’s radio show VG Frequency.
Before I joined GFF, it used to have a filesharing section called Gamingforce Audio (GFA) that hosted a bunch of VGM albums for download. GFA died very dramatically in 2002 when the forum admin racked up an enormous file transfer bill (like, tens of thousands of dollars[2]). Years later, the admin wanted to bring it back, along with a comprehensive database of information about every release. Other prominent members of the community—Secret Squirrel, Gigablah, and Miles—were interested in the database aspect specifically and managed to talk the admin into having the site be a purely informational resource without any downloads. This would end up being the final version of Gamingforce Audio, version 5.
Some time in 2006, after the database was more or less functional, they put out a request for editors on the GFF forums to help fill it out with a bunch of album entries before the site went public. I actually had to send in a staff application, which for some reason is really funny to me in retrospect. They ended up just adding everyone who bothered to send in an application though, figuring anyone who had enough interest to respond was probably worth adding. I actually ended up being the first non-dev to add an album (the tenth overall): the Einhänder soundtrack. I’m not sure that I even knew what Einhänder was in 2006; I feel like I just added this because it sounded weird, but also happened to be well documented elsewhere as it was a release on SQUARE’s label DigiCube. But I’m really unbelievably happy in the present day to have this be my first submission, as it’s one of my favorite soundtracks of all time now.
GFA 5 launched publicly in January 2007 and quickly ran into some trouble once people found out that a lot of our information—credits, tracklists, and scans—were just copied from other reference sites, chiefly Chudah’s Corner and Game Music Revolution Online. The admins talked with the folks who ran those and other sites and decided to get the rest of the western VGM community involved in a more unified effort, something that in retrospect obviously should have happened earlier. It was decided then to also separate the database from Gamingforce, which was in part symbolic because it showed that it wasn’t just a Gamingforce effort, and also in part practical because it would be a bit more professional to not associate the site with a forum that had active piracy and other unseemliness. Code was partially rewritten, data was transferred, and VGMdb was launched in beta on September 16, 2007.
So, technically, I first came across VGMdb because I was already on staff when the specific site called VGMdb came into existence 
The forum is still technically online under my vague maintenance but mainly just exists in an archival state at this point; the remnants of the community now mainly reside on Discord. ↩︎
The admin happened to get out of paying any of it, because he was a minor and therefore couldn’t have legally agreed to the hosting contract 🥴 ↩︎
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