- Joined
- Nov 5, 2009
- Messages
- 22,713
- Reaction score
- 6,194
- Age
- 46
- Location
- Scotland
- Website
- www.youtube.com
A member recently asked me where did the FGM come from and perhaps it would be a good idea to let others know the history of our club.
I thought yeah that would be good but looking back I realise the FGM has had one hell of a history!! Very few of our original members are still around but enough to fill in any blanks in the history of FGM. Take a seat and I will begin.
I joined the Blitz in 2002 after picking up CMBO in a computer shop in town. I played roughly one game against the AI before deciding it would be more fun against other people so I did a search for wargaming clubs and The Blitz was top of the heap. I joined and played a few games against a guy called Bard and another called KilRoy and got thoroughly whipped. Man, that 56k was shit looking back now but it was enough to get a few online games under my belt.
I got addicted pretty quick and entered a few tournaments. Not one of these tournaments finished which really peeved me.
FGM IS BORN
A French guy called Loic (Crazy Horse) was also in all the tournaments that didn't finish and him and I got talking and over the course of a week or two we decided to launch a site where tournaments would be played and finished. It was originally called A Few Good Men ( A Celtic War gaming Club ).... the Celtic bit was his idea as I was Irish and he was French (living in Germany) and he played Celtic music in a band, A Few Good Men was my idea. We launched a tournament from our free website (yahoo perhaps) and requested people to join to play a tournament that WOULD finish. We coupled this free site with a free phpbb message board which I set up. Looking back now it was a very amateurish affair... in fact it was so poor the home page had nothing war gaming related on it but had cut out pictures of pints of Guinness and whiskey and guitars but hey... I was only 22 or 23 years old and had no idea about making websites. (Not that much has changed HAHA!!).
A few guys joined up... 8 people I believe and we played a tournament and finished it... by the end we had 13 members so decided we should improve the website. Loic said his friend would design us a website so while he did start to design us one he walked out half way through leaving us with no website for A Few Good Men (this is a recurring theme you will find in our history).
Another message board was launched and we ditched the yahoo geocities site we had built.
Another tournament passed and players like Smashing, GreenHornet, Steve Lamb (Viking) and Antoni Chmielowski signed up. Steve Lamb then offered to build a site for us and I accepted. Its about this time that Loic and I started drifting apart in our aims and in my opinion he disliked the idea of someone else building A Few Good Men website. Loic and I finally parted with him moving back to France to sell scooters.
A FEW GOOD MEN
With Loic and me going different directions I thought that was it but Steve Lamb was up for continuing the FGM on the foundations that we had built so he designed the site and I continued to run pretty much everything single handedly. This would have been about 2004. Things went well for a year with members like 95Bravo, Kilroy, Mr Yormsha, Red Devil and Panzertwat all signing up. Our membership would have been at the max about 30 players.
We started the FGM fire team around that time playing online fps games and the banter was great. Everything was going well... the club was growing albeit slowly and the Blitz members were starting to come to the FGM for tournaments. Suddenly via ICQ Steve informed me he was shutting down the FGM website he had made as he was going of to work as a builder on mainland Europe and wouldnt have the time to maintain or run it and as I had absolutely no experience of running a website there was no point in passing it to me. Once again the FGM was without a home for about 6 months but again I kept it going by continuing the MB I had been maintaining from the early days despite the thoughts of packing it all in did cross my mind on many occasions.
To be continued......