a small-ish (?) Chilean forum called "Smackgames", that was the official (I think) forum for the TV show of the same name, broadcast during the weekends by a small channel around the turn of the millennium. Smackgames was basically a "geek" TV show that featured videogames, anime, wrestling and music stuff that definitely wasn't on the mainstream, and said channel also broadcast the then-WWF right after Smackgames. It was a very nice block of TV and it was the first approach to wrestling some of us had.
Smackgames, the *forum* also followed the same template - it was a haven for "geek" stuff, with subforums for wrestling, videogames, anime and music, plus some "techie" interests (PC building and OSes, gadgets and so on). TBH I was a 12 year old kid back then (2000/2001) but I had a lot of fun whenever I could log in. I mean, those were the days before broadband internet became mainstream/accessible here in Chile so I essentially depended on "Cyber CafƩs" for internet connection, and it was a half-hour every couple of days at *most*. Wasn't cheap, wasn't that fast either, but I made the most of it. Logging into the Smackgames forum, logging into my MSN Messenger account and chatting with my buddies from other cities and countries for a bunch of minutes and that was it.
Shortly after that I stumbled upon a Tolkien/Fantasy website based on Spain, called ElFenomeno.com, and I became a regular at their forum. Its layout was a goddamn nightmare (it looked like a goddamn comment section for each "topic" instead of a proper board) but I loved the community there and I met some people there who became *very* important in my life a couple of years later. I'll always treasure that website because of those people I ended up meeting. And it was, as you'd expect, a very "geeky" discussion board - with some Tolkien purists who had no love whatsoever for the PJ movies (or movie, singular, as FOTR had just been released and the world was waiting on TTT) and others who were noobs to the whole thing and the FOTR movie had pretty much been their gateway to Tolkien's body of work. That meant the discussions there were very interesting, with the knowledgeable folk trying to summarize info from the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle Earth books to people who had no idea anything like that existed. Great times.
Those two were my first proper forums.
Smackgames, the *forum* also followed the same template - it was a haven for "geek" stuff, with subforums for wrestling, videogames, anime and music, plus some "techie" interests (PC building and OSes, gadgets and so on). TBH I was a 12 year old kid back then (2000/2001) but I had a lot of fun whenever I could log in. I mean, those were the days before broadband internet became mainstream/accessible here in Chile so I essentially depended on "Cyber CafƩs" for internet connection, and it was a half-hour every couple of days at *most*. Wasn't cheap, wasn't that fast either, but I made the most of it. Logging into the Smackgames forum, logging into my MSN Messenger account and chatting with my buddies from other cities and countries for a bunch of minutes and that was it.
Shortly after that I stumbled upon a Tolkien/Fantasy website based on Spain, called ElFenomeno.com, and I became a regular at their forum. Its layout was a goddamn nightmare (it looked like a goddamn comment section for each "topic" instead of a proper board) but I loved the community there and I met some people there who became *very* important in my life a couple of years later. I'll always treasure that website because of those people I ended up meeting. And it was, as you'd expect, a very "geeky" discussion board - with some Tolkien purists who had no love whatsoever for the PJ movies (or movie, singular, as FOTR had just been released and the world was waiting on TTT) and others who were noobs to the whole thing and the FOTR movie had pretty much been their gateway to Tolkien's body of work. That meant the discussions there were very interesting, with the knowledgeable folk trying to summarize info from the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle Earth books to people who had no idea anything like that existed. Great times.
Those two were my first proper forums.
