"Once there was a war..."
With those words my obsession with Gundam, and, more specifically, "Gundam X", began.
It was a late night in 1997, at my local comic book shop, and there were nearly 30 of us in attendance at the local Anime Club Screening Session. This night Stewart, who ran the sessions, had selected a number of Gundam Fansubbs for us to watch. I had already sat through almost 2 hours of "Gundam Wing", and found it entertaining, but not something to obsess over, after all, I had been young enough to enjoy Robotech and Transformers during their early US releases, and this seemed to be just another "Big Robots" type of show.
Then Stewart, our host,asked if we wanted to see a repeat of the "G Gundam" tape he had, or the new "Gundam X" tape. Most of the others wanted to see "Gundam X", and, I didn't raise too much of a fuss, as I could always borrow Stewarts tapes later, if I wanted to see it. (As it turned out, it would be almost 2 years before I saw the "G Gundam" tape, and I'm glad to say, we chose correctly. No offense to G Gundam fans)
As the lights flickered on the screen, and the familiar Bandai logo appeared, I sat back and tried to relax in my seat, a really nasty folding chair. As the series opened, the words of Jamil Neate echoed out of the speakers, "Once, there was a war...." One hour and forty-five minutes later I sat in my seat as the rest of the crowd dispurssed, in complete fascination. How utterly incredible.
As a Mecha fan, I, of course, knew the basics about MS Gundam, and some of the series it had spawned. But this.......
That night I gave Stewart a blank tape, and got him to copy the Fansubbed version of Gundam X episodes for me. He only had the first 4, so I had to make due with those for quite some time. After watching the tape over and over, I finally asked Stewart if he could get any models or toys for Gundam. He told me yes, and I was soon swimming in the MSiP line of Gundams from V Gundam. But this wasn't enough, I needed more. Stewart was able to order several Gundam Models through an overseas importer that the store dealt with, and, after months of waiting, I got my hands on a 1/100th Scale GW-9800 Gundam Airmaster model. Careful assembly, and painting followed, and this model took up a place of reverance in my office. (It helps to finally have a hobby that doesn't involve my job, unlike most other hobbies I have started. ^_^)
Also, about this time, I discovered the Internet, and had my first experiences online. More interested in using it to make money for my business, it was months before I learned that there were fan-sites on the net, dedicated to almost everything.
Well, one afternoon, after being online for quite some time, I went to the Lycos.com website and typed in "gundam" and hit the go icon. #6 on the list was a place called the "MechaDomain."
WOW
At that time Burke Rukes had his site running (it has since come down, and his data is at the Fantasy & Animation HQ) and was in the process of building it to be one of the largest lineart and picture archives I've ever seen. I spent MONTHS going through the site, learning everything I could. Then a friend showed me how to download pictures and pages from the net, and I spent even more time copying the entire site to my Hard Drive, which rapidly filled up, and needed to be replaced.
The first section I completely downloaded, was, of course, "Gundam X."
But there was a problem, although I didn't know it at the time.
My computer was an outdated 80486, with VGA graphics.
As such, I later discovered that my downloads looked awful, when I got arround to putting up my own pics on a small shrine site I made. I thought it looked fine, but one afternoon I was at a friends house, and their new 200MHZ Pentium with SVGA graphics showed me just how bad my pics were.
I was heartbroken, and began saving money to buy a new system, with the intention of downloading the entire site again. But by this time, my second son had been born, and there were more important things to spend money on than a new system, so I waited. and waited. and waited.
Even though I couldn't afford a new computer, my obsession for "Gundam X" continued, and, discovering "EBAY" I was able to get my hands on even more models, and a few more tapes in the series.(which would eventually get eaten by a hungry VCR. $#@%@#$%@)
Finally the day came when I was able to get a new system. The first thing I did, once I got it home, was to get online and go to the "MechaDomain" site and download all the "Gundam X" stuff.
About this time, also, I got back into Role-Playing Games (RPG's) after a 4 year abscence. During one galaxy spanning mission, I needed a big robot to do serious damage, as I'd accidently gotten my characters in over their head, and would have almost certainly have killed them, if I couldn't find something to save them. (What do you expect, when the Valkyrie squad leader taunts several hundred Zentran and Marduk warriors) I wanted it to be a Mecha, not a Starship, that came to their rescue, as I'd set up the engagement with a series of nasty weapons that blew up any ships that came in close. The characters were supposed to sneak into one of the satellites, and plant a virus, but ... well, players aren't the most predictable people in the world, and now they needed help.
"Here I come to save the Daaay," sang the pilot of the "Gundam X," Tamarin Keldantic. Although a quick blast from her main gun destroyed most of the enemies, the party suffered heavy losses in their victory, including their earstwhile rescuer. Only my wife recognized the description of the mecha that had saved them as a "GX-9900 Gundam X," and she kept it to herself. Later that night, she said that having a Gundam in the game had been cool, and asked why I'd destroyed it. I had to tell her that I didn't REALLY have any Role Playing stats for a GUNDAM. Her Suggestion was that I look online, and maybe find something there. Which I did, finding, the PML, or Palladium Mail List, and the gundam conversions of Magus. (heavily modified for RIFTs (R))
But there were only a few mobile suits, and none that I was looking for.
That got me to thinking, and eventually to writing. I had known about Mekton Zeta (touted as the Game for Gundam fans) for a while, but never been able to get used to the whole Mekton Creation Tables. Frustrated, I sat down with what I was familiar with. Palladium. Within a week, I'd managed to come up with game stats for most of the Gundams from "Gundam X," and even a few from "Gundam Wing" which had been airing on Cartoon Network for months.
I let my friends have a look at what I'd done, and even put them up on another website, and sent them to a few mailing lists I belonged to. Feedback was almost non-existant. Except for 2 guys on one list who complained that the Satellite Cannon was Waaaaaay too powerful, hardly anyone noticed.
Heartbroken, I almost gave up. Then I discovered SteelFalcon.com by Dave Dietrich. The Macross Mecha section of Steel Falcon deals mostly with "Macross 7," yet another Macross sequel. I loved it. I'd recently been given the Macross 7 series by a friend who knew I liked Robotech, and was still watching the series.
"Now there's something REALLY COOL," I told myself. A guy that obviously loves a certain Anime creates a website, not just for pictures and notes, but GAME STATS. More specifically PALLADIUM GAME STATS, so it works with Macross II, or Rifts (both excellent games produced by PalladiumBooks, even if Macross II is no longer available)
"I HAVE to do something like this for Gundam X," I told myself. And I got started. It took much longer than I thought. Late nights, staring at the screen, with a notepad and mechanical pencil under one hand, and my mouse in the other.
Then 2 things happened that almost stopped everything.
FIRST: My Hard Drive melted down. (Can you say Chernobyl?)
Really, smoke pouring out the vents and everything. Everything I'd worked on was lost, except for a couple files, which I'd actually backed up on disk, when I moved them from one computer to the other.
It took a while to get the system back up and running, but when I finally did I was very depressed, and did not feel motivated to continue work. So for months I went to work, ate, and chatted with my friends on-line, ignoring the notepad, and once grand plans.
Then the SECOND thing happened.
The Mecha Domain announced it would be closing it's doors.
Like many others I scrambled to the site, hoping to download my missing "Gundam X" files, only to get 3 files before the "site not responding" error came up. We'd overloaded the server, and Burke had to pull it to keep from going broke, paying for all that bandwidth.
I was even more dejected. I logged off my server, and didn't log back on for 2 weeks.
There was a different story waiting for me when I logged back on . Unwilling to let so valuable a resource simply die, the guys (and gals) at the Fantasy and Animation HeadQuarters (now know as the Mecha and Animation HQ) had volunteered to host the MechaDomain Information.
It took a LOT of patience, but eventually the "Gundam X" section was uploaded, and I was probably one of the first people to access it. (the link from the main page didn't even work, and a couple pics were missing, or miss-named. They were fixed within 16 hours, and I fixed what I needed to happily. ^_^)
So, once again, I began getting Gundam stats and pics off the web, but, I didn't know what to do.
I was using a lot of Hard Disk space to save this stuff, and it just sat there, hardly used at all. And I was beginning to get a lot of conversions done, but they just sat there, looking like very dull ".txt" files.
It was then I had a brainstorm.
Do what both of the sites I loved, SteelFalcon.com, and F&AHQ(now M&AHQ) had done:
Make a site with as much information as I can gather, and put it up for the world to see.
And so, after a lot of work, we come to THE GX PROJECT.
It has grown from the initial plan of only being a "Gundam X" page to something else. Something much, much larger.
I hope you like it.
Kelly Green 1-2-03