The Timeline of Altering Time

This is what the site looked like in early 2001, before it was called Altering Time. Sad eh?

Prehistory: First there was time

While flattering, the popular belief that the time used to work on the site comes out of nowhere is more or less false. Altering Time is, ultimately, the product of time. Hours, days... months even. Believe it or not, if you were to take all the time spent on this site and run it straight, you'd have months of time, at the least.

1999: Year of Darkness

Allen, a young, lone, newbie programmer, new to the web but with a gaggle of old-school games and distractions under his belt. His computer, a 380Mhz K6-2, only looked good beside his best friend's 333Mhz Celeron. As fun as making little DOS and Windows games was, the need for "hot seat" multiplayer and the amount of work they required was getting discouraging.

Allen wondered, "How hard is it to make a website anyway? Can't be that hard." Of course, he was wrong. This curiosity doomed him to years of coding, recoding, and recoding some more. The tools at hand were an old copy of Frontpage Express that came with old versions of Windows, and a free webspace account found through a web search. A name was chosen, literally at random: The Edge of Reality.

The transition site between the garbage free hosting and being called Altering Time.

2000: Year of Curiosity

The number of times that poor little site was redesigned and rewritten was ridiculous. Trying to use Frontpage Express to make a decent website without any coding knowledge is pretty much impossible, which wasn't obvious at the time. Many mistakes were made and learned from, not the least of which were using images for backgrounds, using frames for layout, and thinking people would care about something just because it was put there. Most of the content was lists, jokes, pictures found on the web, and other mundane things. Slowly but surely as the site started to suck less, people started to actually visit it out of their own free will (rather than "Hey, check out what I put on my site!" "Kay, fine.")

2001: Year of Struggle

Then, Allen and his friends Chris and Kate had an idea: it could make money. In hindsight, making money is harder than it looks. Allen nominated the name Antipode for the venture, a latin word meaning exact opposite, and registered antipode.ca. Kate's dad got us some ad-free cost-free hosting for it, and the business model was chosen: the site would be a portal to sell their next windows game, titled Zero. Zero was to be a RPG-type fantasy game, of which Allen had made quite a number, and WarTech 4 (the last Windows game Allen made, with much help from Chris) met pretty good reviews from friends and family. The entire site layout was redone with this in mind, taking it to a totally new level from The Edge of Reality. Antipode.ca was born.

One of the earlier Altering Time front pages.

Problems mounted, which is probably to be expected when high school kids try to start a business with no product and little plan. They all started using Macs, which made the Windows development less appealing. The game turned out to be a much larger undertaking than first thought, a major stumbling block being art and music. The new layout was a lot better, but still didn't classify as good. People had trouble remembering antipode.ca partially due to the odd word and partially due to not being a .com. Tensions and disagreements rose between the three, and the site traffic didn't take off since there was nothing interactive. The hosting, while free and professional, was on a Windows server, which really set back Allen's attempts at doing something more revolutionary. All in all, things didn't blast off like they hoped.

2002: Year of Alteration

The three met many times (over instant messaging, which was one of the problems with the whole thing) and resolved some of the problems. After an all-night frantic search for an available and easy to remember .com domain name, Chris discovered something that was way better than anything else: alteringtime.com. Allen paid for hosting, set up the new site on a proper UNIX box, and immediately set out learning how to make dynamic pages. More importantly than anything, however, Allen spent an entire day setting up the Altering Time Forum. It was intended to be a distraction, a curiosity really. Instead, it took off right away, with dozens of people joining in days, and a hundred joining in a couple months. The site traffic shot through the roof, and there was finally something to do. Although their dreams of making the site profitable faded away, Allen kept maintaining it, sometimes with their help, tweaking and improving over time.

What Altering Time looked like in 2003.

2003: Year of Asylum

As time went on, more and more interactive parts were added. First quotes and the Forum, then WTF sites, and a set of tools to easily keep the site fresh and up to date. Once things settled in, however, a project began that was possibly be the biggest endavour Allen had ever taken upon himself: Political Asylum. A fully multiplayer web-based game; not just a distraction, but something worth playing. It took more than a year, but Asylum grew, and matured far beyond its original design. Although many lessons were learned in its making, it still became something quite impressive and full, despite being designed with some limits and flaws. Asylum coding started in October 2002, with Public beta beginning in July 2003, and completion January 2004.

2004: Year of Growth

2004 started off with the bang of a site redesign, bring the site to fairly modern web standards. Asylum's public launch spurred significant growth in visitors and general traffic. The site refined somewhat over the year, continuing the polish to Asylum and some of the other features. The large community that grew up around Political Asylum and the ever-refining site inspired (and pushed and prodded) Allen to start another game.

2005: Year of Faith

Another year brought another site design, yet again improving the site's look and feel. Development is in full swing for Engineering Faith. Faith is a complete revisitation of the decisions and gameplay devised during the development of Asylum, and is progressing well.