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Word spread slowly, but eventually people started coming to the OPCFG. They were greeted on the main page with this message:

Welcome to the official OPCFG home page! The Organization for the Preservation of Classic Forms of Gaming is dedicated to getting the coolest Japanese games released here in the US that have been passed over for American release by their respective companies. Send your suggestions here, and we'll see about getting them released - no promises, but we will try our best!

Hi, I'm Rob Strangman. I got really ticked off: most of us diehard gamers are getting the shaft from most of the companies we've been supporting since the mid-eighties (the incident that was the final straw for me was the cancellation of the Salamander Deluxe Pack). Email me at lstra@totcon.com if you want to be added to our list of gamers and to vent any frustration in the form of complaints - we're working on getting the games that everyone wants here released. We need all of the support that we can get!

There really wasn't much content on the site, but everyone seemed to love the idea that someone was finally going to stick it to these money hungry companies. After recieving numerous emails about what games people would like to see, I decided to go ahead and send out some survey questions. The results, once posted, were in essence the OPCFG's very first Special Features article. I've archived it here, complete in its original form - none of the extra frames and such that I added in late 2001 are present.

I had a lot of grandiose plans that first year, only some of which have finally been realized over the past two years or so, such as the Import Cover Archive and the Import Reviews section. I also had the privilege of meeting a lot of really nice people that first year as well - some of whom are still visiting the OPCFG even today. Most of them were enthusiastic about the whole concept behind the OPCFG - even if they lived outside the U.S., as a lot of games never made it to places like Great Britain or Australia. Links were swapped, ideas were given, and things were running smoothly. I even came up with the Official OPCFG Award (the original design was created by Kurt, and the final design was courtesy of Mike Boyajian), and started presenting it to websites that I felt were doing their best to help keep classic gaming alive.

Then everything fell apart.

Before the OPCFG was even quite a year old, two major setbacks in the site's life struck, and struck hard.

The first major thing to happen was me losing my steady net access. I simply didn't have the means to stay online, other than what time I could spend in my college's computer lab - which admittedly wasn't much. Kurt was still doing the bulk of maintaining the site, as I still knew very little about HTML. However - and this was the second setback - Kurt had less and less time to even think about running websites, due to increased pressure from school and work. Because of this, not only did the frequency of OPCFG updates slow to crawl, but so did updates on Kurt's sites - The Castlevania Dungeon, The Contra Headquarters and The Classic Review Archive. In fact, other than the Dungeon, his sites never did quite recover from that time.

People slowly stopped coming to the OPCFG. Months went by without any major updates (or any updates for that matter). Due to my lack of net access, email sent to me went unanswered. On top of that, in June '99 I went through an extremely nasty breakup with my fiancee (not Lisa, the woman that became my wife last year, but my ex Mary), and my desire to do anything else with the site decreased. It eventually got to the point that it looked like the OPCFG was just another dead gaming site in a sea of abandoned and forgotten gaming sites.

Just when everything looked like it was over for the OPCFG, though, something amazing happened...

In late 2000, thanks to the company I was working for at the time, I got my steady net access back. Then I had gone ahead and set up a small "About Me" page on Geocities. Eventually I took a cue from Lewis Smith and decided to start updating the site every week or so, in the process renaming the site zero signal. During the course of zero signal's evolution, I started to learn more about HTML... and as I did, my thoughts turned back to the poor neglected OPCFG.

In June of 2001, I felt comfortable enough with HTML that I contacted Kurt and requested that he turn over the OPCFG to me, to be from this point on completely under my control. He agreed (after all, he still had no time to update it), and I transferred everything to Geocities. Originally I set it up on my zero signal account, but after both sites started getting shut down every hour, I moved the OPCFG to its own account.

From there I started renovating the site. I threw out most of the original content and links, as most of them were either dead or dying. I added new sections (including a lot of the sections I had planned during the first year), a link to my discussion forum The Third Moon, which has since become the official OPCFG discussion forum, and in late 2001, I completely redesigned the site to match the other classic gaming website that I started around the same time as I began revamping the OPCFG - West Mansion: The Splatterhouse Homepage. The OPCFG was now busier and bigger than ever - and thanks to the large amount of classic gaming sites that had sprung up in the two years that the OPCFG had been neglected, the word about the site started to spread again. I even started giving out the Official OPCFG Award again for the first time in years.

I also abandoned the original idea behind the site. I hadn't had much success with the various petitions and such that I had tried during the site's first year (I had even suggested boycotting Konami of America until they gave into our demands, but that never got off the ground), so I decided to make the site's focus information and knowledge about import games. The listing of Import Stores that I had at the time was a start, and my decision to keep the reviews mostly 2-D and import-only helped with that. Of course, the Special Features, Links and Top 100 sections kept me firmly on the track of classic gaming, which was one thing I wanted to do anyway. After all, without those I wouldn't exactly be helping with the preservation of classic forms of gaming, you know?

Don't get me wrong, though - if I hear about an great import game that's being left in Japan, I'm going to do my best to draw attention to it and (hopefully) try to get it released here.

In 2002 the OPCFG grew the largest it had ever been. Between myself and the guest contributors, the Import Reviews and Special Features sections increased in size. I added more articles to the Top 100. Word about the site continued to spread, and even now more reviews and Special Features articles have been either planned or already added. Also, in March of 2002 I snagged what I consider to be the biggest coup for the OPCFG to date - my interview with the legendary Japanese music composer and game designer (not to mention all around nice guy) Yuzo Koshiro!

I really do find it hard to believe that five years has passed since I initially approached Kurt about creating the OPCFG. So much has happened, to both the site and myself - but yet it seems that it was only yesterday that the OPCFG went live for the first time. Hopefully this will just be the first milestone in the OPCFG's life, and barring any kind of major disaster, I hope to still be here updating when the site turns 10!

I would like to thank all of the site's visitors, both past and present, and I'd like to thank everyone that's contributed to the OPCFG in some form or another - be it as a guest reviewer, guest Special Features author, or even as someone who's just contributed some bit of info that's made the site better. Without all of you, the OPCFG wouldn't be what it is today, and I thank you for helping make the site what it is. You all have my gratitude. ^_^

Special thanks, of course, must go to Kurt Kalata. Without him, it may have been years - or never - before the OPCFG would have existed. Kurt, if you're reading this, thanks for everything you had done during that first crucial year.

And to Mike Boyajian, the man that created the OPCFG logo and award - you have my thanks as well, wherever you are.

People have had a lot of nice things to say about the OPCFG over the years. I've never been one to toot my own horn, so to speak, but a lot of the following quotes genuinely took me by surprise when I read them. These have all been culled from different websites - some OPCFG Award winners, some not, and some that I don't even know - the links to which can be found next to the quote author.

And no, I didn't pay any of these people to write them. What kind of person do you take me for? ^_^