Tactical Gamer History
From Tactical Wiki
As originally posted by Apophis in response to an "inquisitive newb":
Tactical Gamer has been through many incarnations over the years. It originally began 9 years (1996) ago as "Network 42". I used to host Quake 2 LMCTF servers out of a data center that I ran in Providence, Rhode Island on an old Sun Sparc 1/170.
After spending tons of time playing LMCTF and TFC under Quake 2, the Half-Life engine came out and we switched over to running HL Team DeathMatch servers. We still had strong team orientation in a deathmatch environment. When Counter-Strike was released things really started to roll.
I got really tried of playing an objective based, team-oriented game with a bunch of public players that would sooner shoot you in the back to take your weapon than to actually work with you to achieve your objectives.
On July 9th, 2001 I posted a message in the alt.games.half-life.counterstrike news group with a simple goal. Find out how many people out there thought the way I did about CS and determine if it was feasable to create an environment condustive to teamwork and tactics.
>> View original alt.games.half-life.counterstrike thread here
The response I got from this post was mostly enthusiastic. At this point in time, Network 42 Professional Counter-Strike was born. After playing CS for some time, we started getting into Ghost Recon and changed the name of the site again to "Network 42 Tactical Gaming". We continued to flourish and grow.
During this point in our history, I was the Chief Technology Officer for an Internet development company here in Rhode Island. Having access to the entire datacenter and more bandwidth than I could ever shake a stick at, N42TG was a completely free environment. With all the growth we experienced it was determined that we needed a new identity. Something that clearly said what the community was. One of our members, Kunin, happened to have a lot of knowledge in branding and identity development. Kunin created a new name, logo and image for the site and turned it into what it is today: Tactical Gamer.
Eventually, the dot com bubble burst and my company's datacenter was closed and Tactical Gamer was about to be homeless. There was a brief period at this point when I took on a couple partners and we tried building a server hosting company, but that only lasted about 10 months.
A year ago Tactical Gamer and I were back on our own. I felt obligated to keep the community together and sought out a datacenter to use for our web site and gaming servers. Since that point, the community has been operating completely under its own steam. All of the resources of the community are paid for by the supporting members. As our supporting membership base grows, we are able to provide more services to the community.
I chose the datacenter in Texas for a variety of reasons. Mostly due to the peering agreements they have with the 13 diverse backbone providers that COLO in their facility and the price/performance of their services.
Physical distance has VERY little bearing on an end-users "ping". It's mostly about peering, connectivity and network saturation. Our data center tested the best of approximately 12 data centers I evaluated around the country. It has the capability of providing low ping service to almost every broadband ISP in the country.
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