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Starting the Interguild

The Interguild originally started with a group of people who were interested in the game Hannah and the Pirate Caves (HATPC) and its great level editor. This game was created by Neopets.com, unfortunately, and it didn't have many features to help the thriving community of fans that it had unexpectedly created. At the time, Neopets was fairly popular with the older crowd as it neared its peak of popularity, but HATPC also attracted a few people from other sites, as well. The site had a feature where members could build guilds (or clubs), and there were several guilds about HATPC. However, as the game was neglected, many of these guilds died out. In an effort to save the HATPC fan base, Jebby from the "HATPC Guild" began looking for other guilds that hadn't died out yet so that the remainder of the HATPC community can be united. On September 27, 2006, Jebby discovered the "Pirate Caves CaveMakers Association (PCCA)" guild, met with its founder Acceleron_3000, and the "Inter-guild" was created. The era of the "HATPC Interguild" began.

Throughout the course of this "era", the Interguild would develop into an unusually close-knit community. While it tried to attract more visitors, it never really set out to be an extremely popular site. What it mainly became was a place where the relatively few people who stilled enjoyed HATPC could get together, share their creations, and just have fun, basically. But how would this small group of players change the Interguild from a tiny, one-purpose site into a wider and more ambitious website?

Remembering the Guilds of Old Interguild

The major point of the old Interguild was to accomplish what any dedicated gamer would want: to find and meet other people who enjoy the same game. Since the game was created on Neopets.com, along with the fact that the Interguild had no website at the time, it seemed logical to hold everything in Neopets itself. (Thank goodness that at the time, their layout had not yet become so kid-ified) There were a total of 4 guilds, and also something called the AAH Chatgroup, in the old Interguild. All the guilds joined the Interguild at around the same time period, except for the AAH, which was created by one of the Interguild members in May of 2007.

The HATPC Guild (sometimes called HATPCG) really is the "biggest and longest running Hannah and the Pirate Caves guild that there is," as its front page still says. It was created on November 27, 2003, which was only five days after the game was released.

The PCCA guild was founded by Acceleron_3000 on April 12, 2006, which was five months before the Interguild was made. What attracted Jebby and so many people to the guild was the incredibly large image layout that Acceleron had managed to make for the guild. It was filled with information and was a major driving force in gaining visitors. Throughout the HATPC Interguild, the PCCA quickly came to be the most popular of all the guilds. While it could never compete with the 600 inactive members of the HATPC Guild, it held biweekly competitions (which were abbreviated as "comps), which later became triweekly. The Caving Competitions eventually became the PCCA's soul, and for veteran members, it's hard to think of the PCCA without reminiscing about these comps. Today, the PCCA still runs the Interguild's HATPC competitions, and while most of its activity occurs outside the guild itself, the guild remains as the "Official Guild of the Interguild" as a sort of outpost to recruit new HATPC fans.

The next guild to join the Interguild was the Cavers' Guild, created by Flame (flamming_bolder). With its famous black and red color scheme, it never really broke free from it's title as a "small guild". However, it did set up its own system similar to the PCCA's Caving Competitions, which really helped the guild.

The fourth guild to join was the HatPC Raters and Idea Givers. Created on November 18, 2005 by _its_happy_bunny_ and shammo_guy, it was currently being lead by Jellsprout. The HATPC Raters really didn't do much, and was definitely the smallest of all the four guilds. It held a comp or two after joining, but they weren't very successful.

The AAH Chatgroup was first created by egruntz in May of 2007 and was originally called the (Pirate Caves Association) PCA Chatgroup. The name was changed due to the similarity with the PCCA, but it did share an almost business-like relationship with the PCCA. The AAH (All About Hannah) chatgroup was a revival of the old Neoboard (Neopets message boards) topics that came before the major guild era. Back when HATPC was a very popular game, the message boards would often have several topics related to HATPC. These included "Cave Rating Boards", which would accumulate fairly high page numbers before being pruned. The purpose of the AAH was to not only revive those times, but also to help bring more members to the Interguild. It was fairly successful in some instances, and it was also very entertaining as members planned to meet at certain times.

The AAH and the other guilds would quickly die out because the Interguild had also been constantly looking for ways to separate itself from Neopets.com. Especially with the creation of the Interguild Forums, there was little need to ever go into Neopets.com unless you wanted to upload a new level. The Interguild even set up a link where HATPC can be played in a separate window without having to play it on Neopets.com. And the Interguild eventually became somewhat radically anti-Neopets (whereas before they were only mildly against them), especially when the major Uploader Glitches began.

The Interguild Gets its First Website

After two months of managing the Interguild through Neopets.com, the PCCA founder Acceleron_3000 created a new site for the Interguild at "interguild.domingo.org". Domingo.org was a domain name that his father (who runs the very successful Livio.com -- the largest portal about the Dominican Republic on the Internet) had previously let him use. Instead of getting a whole new domain, Acceleron improvised. On November 21, 2006, the first part of the site was up, and that was the forum in which everyone from the Interguild could meet in one place, whereas before they switched from guild to guild. A few weeks later, the "main" part of the site was built, but the main things happened within the forums, which was another example of how the community overshadowed the "website". Members couldn't care less about the rest of the site. As long as they had the forums, the Interguild prospered, and it could be argued that the homepage and the other pages were merely there for newcomers. All of the important aspects of the Interguild were run at the forums. Competitions were mainly advertised there, the level galleries were organized there, and even the guides were published using the forums. An effort was made to get these things onto official pages, but very little was actually done.

This was an important period of the Interguild's history. It lasted for about two years, and all it was focused on was HATPC. Masterpiece levels were made, glitches were discovered, researched, and later used in levels, and it was a just great place to go and have fun when you were bored. After about half a year, the first HATPC video was made by Jebby, and we even made a primitive version of the Video Archive.  The videos even attracted pre-Interguild HATPC players who found the videos on Youtube. During the second year, however, things started to die out when  Neopets.com began to create new problems for HATPC, as described in the next few paragraphs. And at one point, all of the guilds were declared "dead" except for the PCCA, which was still active due to its scheduled competitons. This was when the PCCA became the Official Guild (on Neopets.com) of the Interguild. The other guilds left their pages up as a sort of monument, except for the Cavers' Guild, which was deleted. By then, no one looked at the Interguild as an "alliance" among the guilds, but instead as the whole community with the PCCA being its way to attract more HATPC players from Neopets.com. At this point, not even the guilds were important as long as the Interguild was still alive.

Many members came and went, but there were several members that deserve recognition, such as canadianstickdeath, shos, jellsprout, Dando52 (Dando), Fungus, JDouble, Isa, flame, mystic_brendan (qbreadd), magnapple, Haily, Hannah Banana (aych bee), Quirvy, Mysteryman, GAWman, and TehMarz. Overall, the era of the HATPC Interguild contains the roots of the current Interguild. It defined the Interguild's personality and its emphasis on the member community.

Time for Change

On March 30, 2007, during the Arpil Fool's Day weekend, the staff behind Neopets, known as TNT (The Neopets Team), attempted to add HTML filters to their level upload page, while accidentally blocking out some key characters that were needed for certain tiles in the game, such as arrows and ladders. This glitch and its specifics are further explained here, but the Interguild members were angered by the staff's rushed solution and how they seemed to not know how to run the game properly. Despite being a relatively small community, hundreds of error reports were sent to TNT by means of repeatedly copy-and-pasting. On the front page of the old Interguild site, a news post contained a detailed report that was to be sent to TNT. The members were told to copy the report, paste it into the "report an error" page on Neopets.com, press submit, then click Back on the browser's history, and press submit again. They would continue to click Back and submit until they felt like it was enough, but then they would continue it another day. Some pre-made error reports may have also appeared in some guilds, and at one point, Magnapple created an image button and a page that advertised the cause by telling people to "Help Save the HATPC Uploader". This entire "crisis" became known as the Greate Uploader Glitch of 2007. Several prized levels were now unplayable, and members feared that they could never enjoy them again. The glitch wasn't fixed until May 15, and there are still people who think that it was fixed not because of the hundreds of reports that were sent, but because TNT noticed a drastic drop in the entrants to the weekly Pirate Cave of the Week contest, which may have lead them to finally look into the problem. When it was all over, members recieved one automated message from TNT for every single message that they've sent, and many members reached the 100-message limit of their inboxes.

This entire event was very significant in that it was the first major event that lead the Interguild members to view TNT from a purely negative viewpoint, whereas before almost no thought was made about them. This glitch also threatened the existence of the HATPC community that had been created during the previous eight months. Previously, HATPC was more of a fun passtime, but now members felt the urge to protect the game that they all enjoyed. This event would thus create a stronger emotional connection between the members and the game, which would prove itself later when the idea to leave all of HATPC behind would come into play.

Seven months later, at the start of 2008, TNT shocked the Interguild members with a new uploader glitch. This new glitch of January, which was cleverly named as the Great Uploader Glitch of 2008, was much milder than the previous glitch. As described here, the glitch was another attempt to fix the HTML problem but was triggered by a more rare incident. Similar to before, pre-made error reports were created, but little were actually sent. By now, the members had very little motivation, especially when faced with the possibility that all previous error reports never actually reached TNT. Because of this, many people knew from the start that this glitch was here to stay. Then there was an important conversation. Members were talking about how much better it would be if HATPC was owned by another company, or better yet, if they owned it themselves. Then Acceleron suggested making a duplicate of HATPC, one that wouldn't include TNT's problems. Then he realized that this idea had the possibility to become a reality, especially since he had access to Adobe Flash CS3 and many other Adobe Creative Suite programs. It wasn't before long that he decided to do the idea, and 2008 began with the birth of a new era.

The New Game Era

Acceleron had not known anything about Flash, but he was willing to learn for such an experiment, which would free the Interguild of the decaying management of HATPC. The project became known as "The New Game", and a new forum board was created to house all of the conversations regarding the New Game. Almost immidiately after its creation, the New Game forum board created a large boom of activity, which contrasted sharply with the negative impact of the Great Uploader Glitch of 2008. It was almost as if the glitch has disappeared. There were so many new ideas and topics being made that organizing it was impossible, and it wasn't until many months later that a successful organizing method had been created. It was difficult to keep up with the posts in the board, but eventually, the board was split into four forum boards: Concept Division (or the "everything else" division), Character and Story Division, Artwork Division, and the later-to-be-used Level Discussion board.

It wasn't long before it was decided that they could not make a duplicate of HATPC, because of copyright issues, especially since the game would be on the Internet. Instead, a new theme was explored, but the gameplay stayed mostly the same. Enough was changed and added to the game so that people wouldn't think of it as a rip of HATPC. However, while planning of the New Game began in January, actual work hadn't begun until May or June, which was when Acceleron had summer vacation from school and finally began to seriously learn how to use Flash. It wasn't until that summer that the project began to pick up, and the project later became known as Aeon.

While the Interguild members decided to be more creative and design their own game, the idea to duplicate HATPC was not entirely abandoned. One member known as Teh Marz began to create his own version of HATPC using the programming language of Python. His rate of progress greatly exceeded that of the Interguild members (or more specifically, of Acceleron), but this lag that the members experienced was not entirely a bad thing. During this enormous delay, much discussion happened. Several ideas were explored and rejected, but ultimately, this proved to be very helpful to the overall game, as several of its greatest features were suggested during the summer.

A New Purpose

The New Game caused a dilemma for the Interguild. If it was replacing HATPC, what would be done with all of the levels and work done within the past two years? Up until that question was asked, it was assumed that the New Game would be placed under a new site. The question was whether or not this new site would keep all of the previous two years' worth of HATPC levels and glitch research. Some had assumed that the new site would be only about the New Game, while other wanted to see both games. Events such as the Great Uploader Glitches had tested the Interguild members' dedication to the game, and giving up HATPC was now a surprisingly difficult task to accomplish.

Eventually, a new purpose for the Interguild had become decided: it would become a site dedicated not only to HATPC or the New Game, but to all great level-making games on the Internet. Then after a long, confusing, discussion, the idea was slowly tweaked to allow for any  game with any kind of sharable content. Of course, only games that were considered "good" would be accepted into the Interguild community.

NewInterguild

Eventually, the new site was codenamed "newInterguild" because Acceleron was creating the new layout under "newinterguild.doming.org". However, the new Interguild site at "interguild.org" would take an unsually long amount of time to complete, and Acceleron already had a reputation for long delays. Work on the new site began in mid-July, but the site wasn't released until Saturday, December 13, 2008. This was because of a series of events that kept delaying production on the site, as well as the New Game, and when the school year started, it slowed it down even more. However, the Interguild was still showing a very promising future.

One might ask why the new site was named "Interguild", especially when the original name was chosen for the purpose of the old Interguild. However, the name had stuck by then, and very few members wanted to let go of it. But the name also finds new meaning under the new purpose. The Interguild: one united community made up of separate groups about the different games that all share something in common. And so the shift from the old meaning of the name to the new meaning marks the turning point from something that was more of a passtime to an entire new site with a unique community of members.

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User Comments (4)
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soccerboy13542
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Friday, October 18 2019, 1:27 am EST
~*~Soccer~*~

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After looking at some of the recent stuff posted, I realized that I never knew that much about the original neopets guilds that were around... I would've just turned 8 at the time of the merge into Inter-Guild.

It's been really interesting reading about all of this stuff, a strong sense of nostalgia and wonder in how such an interesting community came to be from a quite small sub-section of the internet.  


'Livio' said:
You know, I was thinking of getting an internship at Microsoft, but I'm not sure I want their lameness to rub off on me.
Quirvy
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Sunday, March 29 2020, 3:42 pm EST
  

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lol I love how much longer the paragraph is for the PCCA, because obviously Livio would know more about that than any of the other guilds. This line is also amusing to me:

Quote:
Today, the PCCA still runs the Interguild's HATPC competitions, and while most of its activity occurs outside the guild itself, the guild remains as the "Official Guild of the Interguild" as a sort of outpost to recruit new HATPC fans.


Similar but different from soccer, I also felt very detached from the 'Guild' History of the interguild. My 'HatPC Childhood' was the "Cave Rating Boards", only towards the end of them being active did I join a guild, because activity levels from people who would play HatPC were so low that you couldn't maintain anything from the Neoboards anymore. I didn't care about the guild organization itself as much as I cared about keeping those general boards/conversations going. Thus, the interguild was never about 'uniting the guilds' to me as much as it was 'providing a permanent place where a bunch of people could chat without having to deal with the trash that was the neoboards' (but I did come in months after the Interguild was created, I think)

ALSO, DOES ANYONE REMEMBER A REALLY OLD HATPC FORUM THAT PRE-DATED THE INTERGUILD??? I'm pretty sure HB was there. I remember practically nothing about it, I think it was a lot of older people from the Neoboard cave rating topics. IDK what happened to that. It feels like lost history to me now.



spooky secret
aych bee
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Sunday, March 29 2020, 4:49 pm EST
when i am king

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For me the cave-rating boards and the guild societies were shrouded in myth and legend - I was a COPPA-abiding child with no access to the communicative aspects of neopets. Thirteen seemed so far away.
A slight correction: I had over-13 side accounts, but I was too afraid of getting caught (or frozen) to use the boards, so I just messed around with html on my petpages and userlookups. Communication with the rest of hatpc society only started when I joined the old interguild. I still used my real birthday though, so I ended up having to log into my parent's email account and forge a permission form to Livio in order to join (thankfully it was all digital)

> ALSO, DOES ANYONE REMEMBER A REALLY OLD HATPC FORUM THAT PRE-DATED THE INTERGUILD??? I'm pretty sure HB was there. I remember practically nothing about it, I think it was a lot of older people from the Neoboard cave rating topics. IDK what happened to that. It feels like lost history to me now.

That would depend on how old the forum actually was. If it was <= 2004 then I was most certainly not there due to being unaware of the existence of neopets at the time. If it was <= 2005 then I would've been barely literate back then and Still Capitalizing Every Single Word In A Sentence by consequence of being barely literate. ON THE OTHER HAND if you mean just a couple of months before the launch of the Old Interguild (in December 2006) then I actually do remember signing up for an old iteration of the Interguild that shuttered within a month or so, but I may have written it off as a hallucination.

...Although one thing that supports the existence of a proto-old-interguild is that when you signed up for the "Old Interguild" I remember wondering who "Sir Bam the 4th" was and when it was clarified that you were Quirvy, I somehow recognized the name Quirvy. Of course I might have just recognized your username as a COTW winner because you guys were like celebrities at the time.


Spoiler:
Quirvy
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Sunday, March 29 2020, 5:03 pm EST
  

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Quote:
ON THE OTHER HAND if you mean just a couple of months before the launch of the Old Interguild (in December 2006) then I actually do remember signing up for an old iteration of the Interguild that shuttered within a month or so, but I may have written it off as a hallucination.
I think that's it. Now that I've read your post, I think Jebby spearheaded its creation originally. Based off his post above, I would guess he wanted to be a leader of our group, and by creating and managing this forum it gave him more a sense of leadership back then. So I think it preceded the Interguild, and after activity died out, he probably reached out to Livio and the actual Interguild got created and replaced it.

Quote:
...Although one thing that supports the existence of a proto-old-interguild is that when you signed up for the "Old Interguild" I remember wondering who "Sir Bam the 4th" was and when it was clarified that you were Quirvy, I somehow recognized the name Quirvy. Of course I might have just recognized your username as a COTW winner because you guys were like celebrities at the time.
Ooh, I think that was it. I'm pretty sure Sir Bam The 4th was me picking a random stupid name on that forum, because as a kid random == funny. IIRC, someone (jebby or GAW, I think) punked me by creating an account with the name "Quirvy", and I decided to not do that when the domingo forums popped up.



spooky secret

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