How did FraggedNation really get its start? Well to tell that story we have to go back to 2002, and the peak of Unreal Tournament 99 online gameplay.

At the time, Unreal Tournament was one of the most popular games played on the Internet. This was an era of growth for online gaming, as widespread broadband availability was just coming to fruition. I was just a freelance UT99 player, and Baddeath was a member of another Clan called ZA, who found themselves drawn to the Zark style of play - this mutator for UT99 essentially turned the Single Shot sniper rifle into a fully automatic weapon of death. Everyone spawned with the rifle, so everyone started out on the same playing field. It was also played at a much higher gamespeed than traditional weapons play, so it was fast, furious, and insanely addictive.

At the time, Baddeath and I had only known eachother on the battle field, however a conversation was struck up in the community regarding a central website for growing the Zark community at large. At the time I was very under-utilized at work, so I jumped at the opportunity to give back to the great community - and thus was born ZarkCommunity.com.

After about 6 months of ZarkCommunity.com being up and operational, discussions amongst the community began about an alternative place to play online ladder matches - the current having been ProvingGrounds.com which is no longer in operation.

This is where Baddeath and I started collaborating on how best to achieve this venture.

I went out and purchased a license and code from a software company [that shall remain nameless] providing ladder scripts written in PHP - a language I was, at the time, completely unfamiliar with. Upon purchasing and installing the script, I began to realize just how horrible it really was, and attempted to get a refund. After being denied the refund, I decided to learn the language and code my own ladder script. After about 3 months of "fixing" the terrible scripts I had received, it was ready for at least a small amount of public consumption - and thus was born zcladder.com; A website dedicated to online ladder play specifically for the Unreal Tournament 99 Zark mutator.

As time went on, it became more and more obvious that a more serious attempt at the ladder should be made given it's popularity. At the time there were anywhere between 25 and 30 Zark matches being played in any given day in several different configurations. So, in the summer of 2003 (actually on the plane flying to northern MN for the ZS clan's first gathering) I began development of a completely ground-up solution that would take zcladder to the next level.

After about 3 months of development, zcladder v2.0 was launched to the public on Sept 15th 2003, and was a huge success. Many more features, player profiles, and other enhancements further brought the community together into a growing organism.

Then a few months later, Unreal Tournament 2003 was released, and with it a Zark mutator. Much of the community waged an outcry for support on zcladder, and so we did. Once these grew popular, it became obvious that zcladder.com would need to support more games than just the Unreal Series, as we had several clans and players asking for other games (like Battlefield 1942) to be supported. This meant that I would need to once again revamp the system to allow another hierarchy, this time being different games.

After a few months of development, several conversations and brainstorming sessions with key community members, and much frustration, a new version of the site was ready to launch in March of 2004.

This time I was not happy with keeping the zcladder.com name, as it no longer truly applied to what we had grown into - we were now more than just a Zark site, we were truly a diverse gaming community of volunteers and devoted gamers.

Thus FraggedNation was born.

As the years went on we suffered many hardships at the hands of server power supplies, hard drive crashes, and even being brutally hacked, destroying nearly the entire codebase - but we still persevered. Our loyal staff, and dedicated community members kept us going strong... all the while being completely independently funded without any corporate sponsors, and only a single developer to keep things moving forward. In fact what most people don't know, is that a single member of this community is the reason it still stands to this day - Thumper. When we were hacked, I threw in the towel. I was tired of spending all my free time after work and weekends developing a site that was just going to be abused like that. She took it apon herself the lobby the community at large into a large group of supporters - enough support that I simply couldn't turn away.

So I took a couple weeks off from work, and dove back into the codebase that remained and revamped FN into v2.0 which was relaunched in late November, 2006.

Since then we have truly grown into an amazing community of like-minded gamers - again, all without any corporate sponsorship or advertising campaigns. We are truly a grass-roots Cinderella story.

Then in May of 2008, Emrys and I sat down to have a discussion about projects that we could pick up that would help grow the Mainstay Technologies company down the line. We started to discuss FraggedNation and the possibility of moving forward with some of the ideas that I had kept over the years and decided that it would be a great venture to make them a reality. This began v3 of FraggedNation, which was re-launched to the public on Sept 15th, 2008 - exactly 4 years after the initial release - as a completely redone website, this time upgraded to PHP5 (a complete architecture upgrade) and lots of "Web 2.0" functionality. This new update also included an additional hierarchy - this time Platforms so that we could support not only PC games, but also console games moving forward. This was a huge step for FraggedNation and has helped it really grow into what it has become today.

Then in early November 2008, we had several high level staff members flown to NH for a brainstorming session on how to integrate credits and other features into the FN community moving forward. This was our first official "offsite" for FraggedNation, and a LOT was certainly accomplished and put on the table for me to develop in the coming months.

And now here we are today - almost 25 million page impressions since inception, over 17,000 members signed up to date, and over 100 admins across the board running autonomously keeping people playing games in a safe, fun, and community oriented atmosphere.

This truly is one of the greatest achievements of my life, and I thank each and every one of our admins and devoted community members for the part they have played in making this such a success.