Genesis Part 1

I've been running this blog entry around in my head for a while as it's definitely a story that's worth telling and I hope would provide a little insight into the genesis of BXB.

Before I carry on, BXB isn't the first website myself and Ashley had a crack at creating. It's actually the third. The first site we ever decided to work on was a Community based venture based around our home town of Coalville. It was going to be organised much like BXB is with content written by myself, the site managed by Ash and a community forum.

I even blagged a little coverage for the site in the local rag I was working for at the time. www.theville.co.uk never went live. (I'm surprised to see that the holding page for this early venture is still up).

The second website we tried out was gotmashed.com which was another Community focused website which was similar to clubbing websites like Gurn.net. Gotmashed launched, we promoted it and gained a small community but despite this it never really took off.

Gotmashed.com held regular "Board Meets" in clubs like Passion in Coalville and my experiences at these meet ups and others like it later inspired me to launch BXB's own Community LAN events. It's funny how an ideal evolves.

Click here to see a photo from the first ever Gotmashed forum meet up which happened at Passion in Coalville on the 21st of July 2001. You can see Ash in the back being flanked on his right by Drakau.

BXB wasn't planned to the level that the previous two sites we worked on were and it was more of a reactionary launch but still quite an interesting story. It's really two stories which converge into one. I'll tell you, to the best of my knowledge, Ashley's side of the birth of BXB.

It basically all began with Halo and Xbox Connect. Before Microsoft had launched Xbox Live, Ashley used to host mini-LAN events at his house where five or six of our friends would get together and slog it out on Halo:Combat Evolved for hours.

Then, tired of the same competition, Ashley signed up to Xbox Connect and we started playing Halo over the Internet with other Xbox fans including such long standing forum members as Little Cheif.

With appetites wet for online gaming Ash secured himself a spot on the Xbox Live Beta testing team. After hours on an MotoGP online demo, he'd made plenty more friends including some that are still working as part of BXB Editorial Team to this day.

Looking around the Internet, there was no dedicated British gaming forum. The original OXM had a reputation for spamming and being full of abusive kids and many more mature online gamers chatted over at Xbox365.com. One day, Ash set up a phpBB forum called www.britxbox.co.uk and the rest really is history.

And the second story? Well, that's my story and naturally that's worth a novel on its own! ;)