Phantasy Star Cave 11th Anniversary

It has been eleven years, everyone. Before I go into the details of how grateful I am for the tremendous support the community has given to the development of Phantasy Star Cave, I would like to begin where everything started off. About 11 years ago, I was sitting on the Internet in a public library playing around with the very basics of HTML and realised that I can pull off displaying an image, and even style some text with <font color="gold">.

At first I was like wow this is pretty cool, let me do some pranks on a few friends. So I registered an account on Angelfire with chazandrune as domain path. My plan was not in any way to create a Phantasy Star page. If I remember correctly, I scanned a photo of the friend I was trying to pull a prank on and added some ridiculous text underneath reading NAME is selling his X (to not go into further details). Nevertheless, I pranked my friend and it was all good. Obviously, I wiped the HTML immediately after the laugh. The day after, I grew fond of this whole website creation business.

Even before I launched PS Cave (that was actually named "Phantasy Star Memories" in its initial 2 days of launch), I saw that there was a strong collaborative interest in expanding the experience of the saga with individual fan contributions. So I created this website not only to show bits of the official Phantasy Star games, but also to showcase the fans' creative spirit; a community where everyone has their open space to discuss theories or express their creativity by making artwork, developing games, writing fiction and more. These are the fans that have made Phantasy Star Cave what it is today. Without the countless submissions, discussions, and more importantly collaborations, this page would not exist. Because of these reasons, and many more, I am dedicating this anniversary to the passionate fans and contributors of the series.

PS Cave went through many make-overs, and many (!) delays for promised updates. It started on a free web hosting network, Angelfire (mb/chazandrune sub domain that was quickly changed to pq/pscave), and went on to ad-free web host Redrival, to Net Games (gaming-specific host). After two years, it was time to register www.pscave.com and its own server, and here we are. I have tried to find screenshots of some of the make-overs that PS Cave have had throughout the years, but I am missing a very special period when we were on Redrival. We were under a green theme style back then. If there is anyone that has a screenshot of it, please send it to me. It will come in handy for the upcoming history page.

Regardless, the history, really, is all about passion; the drive and inspiration to explore one's enthusiasm for an interest that began as a simple gameplay, but quickly evolved into an intelligent and alive appreciation of creative fantasy RPG. The Phantasy Star Saga quickly drew us into something different, may that be a female lead or the dark and genius ending of PSII. This type of creativity, risk and originality that the makers took when producing the series is one that we have grown to celebrate. As the years pass, even though the graphics are fading in comparison to today's releases, I am still impressed by these very decisions of taking a step away from the commercial approach and targeting originality.

Eleven years is a long period to reflect upon, so my apologies to the friends that I will forget to mention. There are a great number of people that I would like to list.

First, the main contributors to the game sections, Wolfgang Landgraf and Hugues Johnson. The hours that they have spent to collect everything from statistics to images amazes me still. It can be easy to underestimate their work, but when you'll be the one sitting there grabbing a screen of each section of a map, or replaying a dungeon to hope for that enemy to pop up, you will know what a pain it is.

Second, Orakio Rob, our Brazilian friend who has invested so much of his time and money to satisfy our interest in unreleased and forgotten Phantasy Star material. He is one our most ambitious community members and it should come as no surprise that he should be praised.

Third, I would like to extend my appreciation to all the inspiring artists, game developers and other innovative forces that have submitted their fan creations. You made PS Cave unique.

There is someone special that contacted me during hard periods when my inspiration for the games was low and any updates to PS Cave were looking weak: BenoitRen, who randomly called me a couple of years ago insisting on assisting me to further expand the site by offering most of his own private time. Make no mistake everyone; if it was not for Benoit's determination that the community is still alive, and his resourceful qualities to continuously make an update, PS Cave would have taken a ticket down the forgotten domains ages ago. BenoitRen is still very actively working with PS Cave and I am truly grateful that he is among us. I got to give him some credit for putting up with my unorganised routine of getting back to his messages and also accepting a few decisions that I have taken throughout the years that we have not agreed upon. Today, I am really happy that I have a friend here that will question my decisions to gain better outcome, and honestly, I hope that he will continue doing so in the coming 11 years!

Additionally, we must celebrate the current and past friends of the community. I am grateful to host a website with such an intelligent user base. Even though I do not post regularly on the board, I am undoubtedly impressed with the discussions and find them endlessly interesting. We must celebrate all past (Naflign, where did you vanish?) and current friends of the community. Thank you guys for 11 years!

So, what do you want to see on PS Cave in the next decade? Bring your suggestions here!

I was going to do a deep rundown of the site's history and make a huge list of what the future will bring us, but instead ended up finding different ways of how to thank everyone... What happened?! ;-)

- Missagh

Here are a couple of old school PS Cave images. If you remember these, then you must be as old as me!

These three classic banners were created to advertise PS Cave back in the days. Please do not use these to link to PS Cave. Use this one instead.