I was a member of Eric Noah's site, and created "The EN World" (a placeholder name at the time) to host our collaborative setting, Daemongorge. The name stuck, although dropped to just "EN World", and we had a hosted forum on Eric's site. Later, EN World started reporting d20 news and reviews and had the URL
www.d20reviews.com (Eric concentrated on D&D specifically). That year we hosted the first ENnies online in a chat room, MC'd by Gary Gygax, as a collaboration between Eric's site and mine. Eric and I became friends, and when he decided to close his site we agreed to move the forum over to EN World.
After an exhilerating database import which - to our amazement - went without a hitch, EN World took over the D&D-reporting duties along with the d20 stuff. The following year, I went to Gen Con (Eric kindly picked me up at the airport) and the first live ENnies were held in a corridor at the convention centre.
Sometime around then EN Publishing was launched under its original name, Natural 20 Press. I don't remember the dates specifically. We released
Wild Spellcraft, which did pretty well - RPGNow was tiny at the time. Later came
Tournaments, Fairs & Taverns, which became a massive hit, and we later merged N20 with Ambient Inc. to form EN Publishing. Denise, art director for Ambient and later ENP, took over the business director role of the ENnies and it grew over the years to the world's premier RPG awards program.
Over the years we had a few disasters. Database crashes which reset the boards (this happened twice - so technically we're on a higher membercount!), financial crisises (crises?) which we got through with the support of the community and their generous donations, long periods of extreme server woes - we still have those, but we have an upgrade this week!
It's been a blast. I can't imagine not doing this now - it's been a major part of my life for a DECADE! I can't believe I was in my mid-20s when I started. Sometimes it's stressful, other times it's wonderful. And now I'm lucky enough to be able to call this my job - and it's actually working!
One decade. 100,000 members. I've made some incredible friends - real friends. I've been fortunate enough to visit and stay in the homes of some of them on other continents, and been pleased to offer the same hospitality in return.
EN World gets a lot of stick on other messageboards. They're wrong. This is, without any shadow of a doubt, the most incredible community on the web. We've had, and have, our problems, sure; and we aren't perfect - but this is a damn good place, a damn good site, and has a damn good community.
Happy New Year; Happy New Server*; Happy 100,000 members! A great convergence of events!
*This week - keep your fingers crossed for a problem-free transition.
