Ahh, Planet Mado’s history…quite a story to tell! Here is a summary of what I could remember:
I (Mado) can’t remember the exact day Planet Mado went online, but I do remember it was in October of the year 2000. For about a year prior to Planet Mado’s opening, my best friend (Dast) and I were really into Dragonball Z. Both of us wanted to play an RPG based on Dragonball Z, so we searched for some on the internet, but we couldn’t seem to find any well made RPG’s based off of Dragonball Z. They all seemed to either be made by young kids (if I had to guess, I’d say from 10 to 12) or by anime information websites that didn’t have enough time to dedicate to the RPG to make it fun and of high quality. They all also seemed to follow the same fighting system and rules, you HAD to choose a character from the TV show and you HAD to role-play that character. While this might be fun for some people, Dast and I wanted to be in an RPG where we actually got to do what we wanted, and act how we wanted.
We searched and searched for a very long time, and neither of us ever really found an Dragonball Z based RPG worth playing. So one day we decided, “Hey, why don’t we make our own Dragonball Z RPG?”. We figured we couldn’t be the only ones in the world who wanted to play a high quality Dragonball Z RPG, and we figured we wouldn’t be able to play since we knew how the game worked, but at least other people would be able to enjoy the experience. So we sat down and typed out in Microsoft Word all of the rules, races, and all of the other information for our new Dragonball Z RPG.
Once we had everything perfect (or so we thought) we decided to make a web page. I had some experience making web pages and working in HTML, but Dast had absolutely none, so once we had our RPG worked out, I went to my house and opened up my old Angelfire account and started working on a layout for our RPG. The first layout was not very good at all, but it worked well enough for what we needed. Our first version of Planet Mado was done through message boards, rather than email.
We told all of our friends who liked Dragonball Z about our new RPG and told them the URL for the website. We also shamelessly advertised it on other sites’ boards until we had about 10 to 15 members. It may not seem like very many, but we were pretty happy that our RPG was going pretty well. Dast and I started talking about changing rules and new ideas, and we had members giving us ideas and telling us what they thought we should do. So we decided to change many of the rules, one of which was changing from message boards to doing the game over email, but since we did change so many rules, we decided it would be more fair to just restart the game, so everyone could have a fresh start with the new rules.
Since the creation of Planet Mado, until about two years later, Planet Mado went through many resets, because we kept getting new and better ideas. Within a year of Dast and I creating Planet Mado, Dast decided he didn’t want to be a part of Planet Mado anymore because of getting a job, among other things. So I got a few new refs, and I believe that’s when Reno started reffing. Reno had been a player of Planet Mado since it’s creation, so he knew how it worked very well. Planet Mado was doing very well and was very popular.
As many of you know, I decided to shut down Planet Mado a few years after it was opened, due to me getting a job, and getting bored of it all. Before Planet Mado was shut down, we had around 50 members. Also, before I shut it down, I had talked with my dad about using PHP in the site so that all members would have to do is click a button, and they could train by themselves without having to email it to their ref. My dad does programming at work all day, so he knew how to do some pretty cool stuff. He is also the one who wrote the original password protection system for members’ stat pages.
I shut down Planet Mado when I was in tenth grade I believe, which would be around the year 2002, so it lasted a few years before I got bored and tired of it. After a few years of shutting down Planet Mado, I started to regret it. I shut it down when it was in it’s prime. I happened to be looking through the history of my brother’s Netscape Navigator in August of 2004, and saw some message boards with the words “Planet Mado” in the title, so I clicked on it, and I found a message board with many of Planet Mado’s old members talking about a new version of Planet Mado! I was pretty excited when I found this, because I thought I would never be able to reopen Planet Mado, since I had deleted all of the files from my computer. Well, here was a website that an old member (Seifer) had made that had all of Planet Mado’s original rules and races pages on it! At first I was really happy, but then I got a little angry thinking that he had copied all of mine and the original creators of Planet Mado’s work. I contacted Seifer and he explained that he had tried very hard to contact me, but I had changed email addresses and I was never on AIM anymore, so there was no way for him to contact me. I wasn’t mad after we talked about it, I was actually very happy that he had done what he did.
I told him I had wanted to bring Planet Mado back for a long time now, but I didn’t have the old files, but now that I had a place to find them (his edition of Planet Mado, called Planet Mado: AF) I wanted to start running it again. I thought I was going to have to make another layout and graphics, but Saint (an old member of Planet Mado, who used to be called Sephiroth) told me about a site that stored some websites on a giant database. So I looked up Planet Mado’s old layout and graphics, bought a webserver and domain name, and put it all up and had Planet Mado up and running again! When I found Planet Mado, Seifer, Saint, and Cloud (another old member of Planet Mado) were reffing, but Seifer didn’t have enough time to ref anymore, but Cloud and Saint kept reffing for me, which is great because they are two of the best refs (besides Reno) Planet Mado has ever had.
Now I am trying to bring Planet Mado back to it’s original glory, and hopefully more than that. I am currently working on getting the autoupdating scripts written again, since I also deleted those when deleting the rest of Planet Mado’s information.