It's hard to believe its been 10 years now. I know how incredibly cheesy this sounds but it really does feel like it wasn't that long ago when in 2004 that a webpage that I could consider to be a home of sorts was opened;
I'm talking about Mega Man Battle Network Universe, a message board with the premise of 3rd person text based roleplaying (hereby referred to as RPing from this point on) between its members. For those that may not familiar with the concept think of it as an interactive fanfiction done in real time between other writers. They were REALLY popular in the early 2000s and I remember being in a few of them during high school. To make a long story short I came across one based on the Mega Man X series called Cybertropolis and after working my way up from lowly newb to admin through my writing talents (I was bar none the best RPer on the site and had pretty much surpassed even the staff in ability from the get go) I pitched the idea of creating a sister site to CyberT in the form of a Battle Network RP as I saw that the series was REALLY popular with older fans like myself and newer people. The head Admin who we all call "Jazz" liked the idea and thus Battle Network Universe was born on the website Avid Gamers. I originally wanted no part in the site itself as I had never played any of the BN games but Jazz insisted I join anyway as he figured given my creativity I'd be able to manage something and so I did. I took my character from the X series campaign in Obelisk the Green Slayer shown here;
And rebooted him as a Net Navi in the form of Obelisk.exe;
I also created a human operator for him that was basically a spitting image of myself, right down to my name. I never liked that and regretted not being able to come up with a more flashy operator name for a long time.
Anyway the site started off simple enough. Sub Boards based on various parts of Battle Network's history were made along with original areas. A good majority of the members RPed original characters however as alot of people just weren't fond of playing the canon characters which is something I may talk about later. The admin had the honor of being able to RP multiple characters and they usually had about 3. These were usually a mix of an OC, Canon character and a boss character for the other members to fight though it was really Jazz that did this the most frequently. Eventually I got promoted to staff *again* for god knows what reason and ended up being the one who got to RP Lan and Mega Man in addition to myself and Obelisk and later on Prisma Shatterstone and Crystal Man.exe. That being said things progressed smoothly with a nice little conflict involving eco terrorists followed by some random trying to attack everyone with his own organization but was ultimately snuffed out by the LARGE number of heroes on the site. The good guy to bad guy ratio between the members was 10 to 1 which is something that looking back on it may have been an issue.
But I digress after some time had passed I decided to try my hand at creating a conflict for the site and I did so with a band of criminals referred to as the "Mavericks." I even got some of the other members to join my stable! There were attacks from them along with attacks from Jazz's own criminals that caused quite a bit of havoc on the site. In addition to this there was an N1 Grand Prix tournament being set up and it was going to be a Zoids Style team tournament with navi groups fighting in royals and stuff. Obelisk and I were pretty much at the center of the Maverick Storyline due to being the puppet master and due to my talents I had made quite the reputation among the other members as being the guy who usually wrote up massively descriptive, layered posts with strategy behind my fighting.
Which made it all the more exciting when the moment finally came that I fought Jazz. The reason was simple. Obelisk posted an open challenge in the Undernet and Jazz accepts after being out of the fold and missing for what I think was several months in story and people were PSYCHED to see this fight happen. To say that this was a marquee matchup was an understatement as it was a battle between the two best RPers and the two most prominent admins (I got another promotion lulz) and we tore the house down. The battle ended up being a draw for reasons I don't remember but it's a fight that I still remember to this day and its easily one of my all time favourites. Jazz at the time was not a great RPer compared to me but that fight made him raise his game and he'd keep improving from there on.
Turns out this would become a thing of mine. People who became involved with me got better in some manner be it as an RPer or IRL in some cases. I was like The Undertaker in that sense. That said the fight left Obelisk so damage he had to be upgraded to his v2 form;
After this things became a little hazy in regards to the Jazz storyline. He did do some more things but the major focus was on my Maverick Storyline and the N1 Grand Prix as after another incident the big bad leader of the Mavericks appeared and declared he'd be in the tournament. He also had Obelisk chase him into places unknown and disappear. Teams are formed and the tournament starts.
Sadly this part of the storyline never get very far as things spiralled out of control due to everyone having some form of finals coming up (it was May ish). Ultimately Sigma appeared with Obelisk as an ally and they proceeded to OWN everyone. I actually got complaints for being too much for the people to handle (think a Tier 0 deck like Tele-DAD going up against Cyberdarks. That was the gap) but it didn't matter as the blow off occurred a few weeks later with Sigma becoming a colossal sized real world Navi that was above the world and everyone banded together to fight him. Obelisk turns face and sacrifices himself to mortally wound Sigma and leaves Mega Man with his Soul Unison transformation to finish the job;
Charge attack was a 2x3 Slash that ignored Shields, Barriers, Auras and Invis, Elec Chips can be charged up for a x2 damage 9 panel explosion, Ominishoes are active and upon Unison all panels changed to water.
The world is saved and things go back to normal with the heroes taking a vacation at Willy's Water Works. However shit gets bad and the water works are out of control. Obelisk's operator returns with a new Net Navi based on my original writing hero but at this point we're all getting fed up with an increasing amount of server crashes from the site's host Avid-Gamers. Over the last few months it was possible to go days without being to log in which made posting in exciting storylines extremely difficult. I had often made cracks about AG's shittiness and wished there was an alternative. Jazz found one in Proboards and the decision to jump ship was unanimous from the userbase...at a cost.
Everything we had done at this point would be discarded. If we went to a new board we would have to start all over with a clean slate.
So be it.
In the end it was a hell of a ride. I grew as a writer and RPer despite everyone around me not being up to my level and I got my first real taste of what being a moderator/admin meant. Dealing with unruly members and whatnot. I was sad to see everything we all worked on be basically forgotten but I was also jumping at the chance to RP Obelisk again. I regretted killing him off and hated my new character, so a reset was fine by me. Thus the new Battle Network Universe was made and everyone moved over as the old site was basically blown up, but not before I took one last screenshot of member activity;
Jesus. I was a BEAST. And wow. Miaka was really fucking active for a newbie.
That being said I hoped you enjoyed this little tale from the past. With BNU's 10th anniversary coming up I definitely plan on posting more snippets heading into summer. I don't know when the next one will come but it'll be interesting in its own right as I get to talk about what I call "The Glory Years."
This'll be fun.
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