History of tbt

[DarthGohan1]

You remember pretty well, most of this is accurate! A few small corrections though: Justin was an active member during the time you mentioned, but he first became a mod a bit later, in 2012. Fish made a lot of our forum designs around the 2006 time, but the site shown here was actually designed by only me. For those wondering, the site was more of an additional thing added to the forum, but we had a relatively popular gaming blog, which Bulerias would write articles for as DarthGohan mentioned. However, a lot of the site was essentially just a bunch of unfinished projects that we had a hard time focusing on while also running the forum. When we moved to vBulletin in 2011 we also changed our domain name to bellteeforums.com and decided to not have a non-forum part of the site anymore.

And yes, like Mino said, Fish did once stop by years ago.

I guess I get a B+ on my TBT history Must have mistaken Justin's modding for when he became a Sage. It's awesome that you've kept the forum alive for all these years!

Has smarttechdragon ever reappeared? Him and fish were the two that I never thought would come back.

 

[FireNinja1]

Kind of neat to think that of how many "waves" of new members there have been now. The original wave for Wild World, 2008/2009 wave for City Folk, I think there was a big wave around 2013? for New Leaf, and now again in 2020... TBT might live on forever

I think there was a huge surge then. I don't remember the exact details (it's been more than seven years at this point), but for the years of 2013, 2014, and almost all of 2015 there was a pretty good amount of forum activity. Back in those days, the ABD gave you interest, Mafia games ran with two to three dozen players, you could get 100 TBT for half a million IGB, the House of Mirrors had mirrors that weren't obnoxiously difficult, and people walked uphill both ways in the snow just to access the website.

 

[Mr_Persona]

I'll give it my best shot.

Rewind back to late 2004. Nsider was Nintendo's official forum, and is where the TBT founders (and many of the other first wave of members) met. One of the boards on Nsider was dedicated to the original Animal crossing game. The board was called "The Crossing Guardian". Here's a screenshot of what it looked like.

If you look closely, you'll see "The Animal Crossing Ask Center", started by an Nsider named Stormtrooper88888. Storm was/is @Jeremy , and the Animal Crossing Ask Center ("ACAC" for short) was a huge thread where everyone went to ask questions and get help for AC on Gamecube. Here's a peek inside the ACAC to see what it looked like:

Around that same time, the end of 2004, Jeremy founded TBT forums, along with @Bulerias (who seems to still pop into TBT from time to time still). The other original admin was Bastoise, also from Nsider. Smarttechdragon15 also met the group at Nsider and although he was a first a Global Mod at TBT, was soon promoted to Admin.

TBT started to grow more throughout 2005, and the staff expanded as well. @Sporge27 , Zero13, @Mino and I were added as mods. Not too long after we added @Justin as a mod as well. I remember there was debate about adding Justin to the staff because he was super active and helped out a lot around the forum but was pretty young at the time.

The whole forum would always get excited when new Sages and staff were going to be announced. Sages were a rank inspired from Nsider, which was a special rank given to members of the forum who made the best contributions. There was a special Sages only board, though not much discussion happened in there to be honest.

There was a huge increase in members around the time of Wild World coming out. The forum was really active, everyone was sharing their friend codes and arranging hangouts in the game... you don't know how excited we were to finally get to play AC with each other, since the original Gamecube game had no online multiplayer! It was a really fun time at TBT.

I think Jeremy also launched the TBT website in the months before Wild World launched. Here's a screenshot of the site:

Jeremy built the site, and Bulerias wrote a lot of the articles. I remember working with Bulerias and Gengar writing previews and reviews for the "Gamer's Lounge" section of the site. I think Fish (also one of the old mods) helped with the design of the site, since he always designed the skins for the forum at the time.

Hope you enjoyed a little bit of TBT history.

I was always curious of how the original forums looked like and now l do!