The following is a briefly summarized history. It is an ongoing project and will continue to be updated and modified. Please contact admin@ssuniverse.com if you see any inaccuracies or you wish to add some information.
Fall 1996:
In fall of 1996, Mike Giardina started a message form on Nintendo.com's BBS. Over the next few months, Mike's column grew to be one of the top 10 topics of the 1000 + on the BBS system. The success came from his ability to answer virtually anything that was asked and to disprove numerous false rumors that had been circulating throughout the Nintendo BBS system. Additionally, people were drawn to his regular trivia postings in the column. Due to the success of his column, Mike decided to create a website for Squaresoft and other RPG games.
January 25, 1997:
On 25th of January, Terra's World of Square, hosted by Geocities, officially went online. At the time Mike used the screen name Terra and was believed to be female. However, not too long after he revealed his true identity and changed his screen name to MG1. At the same time, he renamed his web site Squaresoft Universe. The site offered the latest news on upcoming video games, an art and MIDI gallery, trivia, tips & tricks and its most popular feature, two HTML Chat room provided by BeSeen. Just as its predecessor, the BBS, SSU quickly became very popular. In 1997 standards it was quite an advanced website and it got a lot of visitors.
1997: January '97 - January '98
The years of '97 through the end of '98 were SSU's prime. The chat room had close to 30 regular visitors. The website itself was getting over 1,000 hits per month. Back in 97 1,000 hits a month for a personal website was a lot. It was also around mid 97 when the SSU website got a facelift. The new site featured "frames" which were becoming very popular on websites.
It was also around this time when SSU suffered a number of wars. What was probably the most damaging of all was the war with Sonic Chat, known as the Clone Wars. There were also a number of other internal wars. Many of the computer savvy regulars started to develop Chat Controls, which also started a few mini clone and flood wars.
1999: January '98 - January '99
1998 on through 1999 was a period of change for SSU. The biggest change was that MG1 made a number of disappearances. MG1 sometimes disappeared for so long that we thought he never would come back. During this time a number of regulars tired to create "New SSUs" but for various reasons, each one failed. SSU changed a lot. Many old regulars stopped visiting all together, the room had a lot of new people. And many of the regulars were going through big things in their life. The website itself was also in dire need of an update.
Mid 1998:
After many month of MG1 missing, most believed we'd never see him again. A few frustrated regulars didn't want to see SSU die. New members to SSU were few, and without MG1 the web site was not being updated. It was during this time a group of SSUers created a new web site called New Squaresoft Universe; however, the project was stopped when MG1 came back promising a new website.
January 25, 1999:
January 25th brought a lot of new changes to SSU. After being gone for many months, MG1 reappeared bringing along with him a New Squaresoft Universe. SSU now had it's own web server and no longer had to rely on geocities. It also had a brand new look and feel.
Mid 1999:
SSU's new look was really great. Unfortunately the site's fame wouldn't last very long, when MG1 found his "new religion" and made yet another disappearance. During this time, SSU was no longer getting new visitors to the chat, many regulars stopped visiting altogether. It seemed SSU was near its end. However those who stayed refused to let SSU die.
Late 1999:
During the middle part of '99 it seemed as if MG1 would never come back, making this his longest absence. It was around that same time we started to grow out of our chat host, BeSeen. Although many of us had very powerful Chat Controls, BeSeen started to seem very limited, and with many of their new policies, they plain out sucked.
Early 2000:
In early 2000, an old time regular known as Randofu created a new chat room for SSU using Perl CGI. This room was great: it had the look and feel of BeSeen, but none of their flaws. It also offered many new features such as, midi, picture links, chat commands, fake IP, and many other things. This room was really great, although it had a few bugs that we lived with. Randofu hosted the chat for a little over a year.
Late 2001:
Randofu's chat room was a great host. If it were not for Rand, SSU may not have lasted, forced to stay in the BeSeen Rooms. However, a few bugs in the room sometimes made it difficult to chat. Someone asked The Unknown Hero if he could program a new chat room. At first he said he could not, but later on he changed his mind and started to work on a new room for SSU.
August 2001:
Hero's new chat room went online and officially becomes the new host of SSU chat. Similar to Rand's chat, the room had the look and feel of BeSeen. The room was also minus the Refresh bug that plagued the old room.
September 12th 2001: (A day that will live forever in infamy)
Aside from our aftershock of what happened on the 11th (In New York, and DC). Hero's SSU was discriminately deleted by Hypermart. Hours after the site was deleted, Hypermart sent out a 48-hour notice that should have been sent out two days before. They claimed that hosting a chat room was against their rules.
September 18th 2001: (Another day that will live forever in infamy)
We were fortunate enough that Rand left his chat room online. We retreated to that chat room while Hero was trying to find a new host. However all that changed when Hypermart again discriminately deleted Rand's site. This time, sending the same 48-hour notice after the site had been removed. They claimed that his site used too much bandwidth. We were now forced back to our original SSU room on MG1's website. Many of us were not happy about it; however, it was the only SSU we had left.
Late September 2001:
After a few days of searching, Hero found a new host for the chat. Dark Paladin decided that it would be a great idea to put (SSU Web Site, the very site that you are reading now) on this server. DP and many others worked really hard on the SSU site that was originally hosted at Hypermart. Thanks to the contributions of all SSUers, our site looks great, and SSU Chat (although many times the room is dead) is still alive and kicking after almost after 5 years of being online.
October 2001:
The entire SSU
website was shut down by the Unix Administrator of its web host. It turned
out that the chat room was generating 2GB of error logs a day. After several
hard long days of the chat script rewrite, Hero finally got the script working
properly and the admin reopened the site.
Early October 2002: (Yet more eternal infamy)
At this point SSU had three or four newbies who didn't end up sticking around. One of them, the particularly insolent and annoying one, got rather pissed off at SSU after a practical joke and had a script kiddy friend (so it must have been, because this person lacked the intelligence to do this herself) "hack" the site and deleted the contents of several folders. It was however only a temporary setback; a backup was immediately restored and there was no further attempt. However, three months of log files were lost in the ordeal.
Mid 2003:
Our current host altered their server packages without informing us and cut down on our space allotment while keeping the price the same. This was vexing for several weeks until the cause was eventually discovered. The majority of the log archive was taken down due to the space issue, leaving only a year's worth of logs up at any given time.
January 2004:
SSU considered a new server host with the same if not greater capabilities than the old server which would cheaper and also provide more than double the old amount of space. It was a good starting outlook for the site this year.
February 2004:
The new host was tested and found to be most acceptable. The domain was transferred over seamlessly (though it took a little longer than it should have) and the site was subjected to extensive polishing and file organizing.
March - June 2004:
The new host started giving us issues when it would freeze or stall. We were unable to access the site for long periods of time. The hosts IT people were either unable or unwilling to solve the problems. The problem seemed to be getting worst making it very hard to use SSU at all.
June 2004:
We moved back to our old server. They were offering a new package that would give us even more space then we had on the "new server". The only downside was that it was not free. But it was the same price as we were paying before we left them.