In May of 1996, American high school senior Mike DelPrete had been playing Civilization II since its North American release a couple of months earlier. While it is at present not known for certain, it is widely regarded as fact that he was a fan and avid player of the original Civilization that had entered the gaming market five years before. With Internet access at home and school he undoubtedly saw an evolving digital Civilization community taking root. As first mentioned on the previous page, The Ultimate Civilization II Site (UCIVII) was born on May 3, 1996. Instead of revealing his full or partial ‘real-life’ identity, DelPrete opted instead to do what many before and since have done in establishing themselves within online communities: create an alias and mould its identity from there. The origins of the pseudonym he chose are to this day unknown, but not the pseudonym itself: “The Overlord”.

For the first 5-6 weeks of UCIVII’s existence, the site was hosted on a university server in northern New York state, home to Syracuse where DelPrete lived. It was then that the university’s system administrators noticed the site’s unauthorized presence in server space allotted for academic pursuits. Moreover, that server allotment had been liberally exceeded⁵. No exact figures are known or otherwise recallable as to the assigned allotment or actual disk usage, but rough approximations point to somewhere between 10-25MB. For reasons unknown, these administrators do not remove the site from their network. Instead, they take additional steps to warn DelPrete that his violation of their website hosting policy had been observed, and give him a brief grace period to find UCIVII a new home on the Web. Alternatively, DelPrete could on his own accord shutdown UCIVII somewhere in between ‘that moment’ or once the grace period had passed. He decided to at least try to find a new host for his young site.

DelPrete approached and seized on an opportunity to host the site with Dreamscape ( http://www.dreamscape.net ), his at least then at-home Internet Service Provider (ISP). For most of June 1996 and into October of that year⁶, UCIVII would enjoy a respite from hosting crises. In this regard, stability was assured but this period would also see an internal administrative overhaul that would put into motion a series of events yet to come.

THE ORIGINAL MENU
The original content sections of UCIVII were very much at the core of what constituted the site in its final days. Scenarios, Maps and MOD Packs were the undisputed crown jewels of Civ fansites at this time. A section for each by the same name were established from the outset and the site quickly proved itself the undisputed champion of quantity of them all. GameCenter, then the general gaming department of C|Net ( http://www.cnet.com ), commented that UCIVII was “[t]he granddaddy [of Civ sites] with more maps and [MOD]s then you can shake a stick at”⁷.

Very little description beyond the title, author name and file size were offered for each file and rarely did they include documentation otherwise. While the majority of fansites in the Civilization community gradually moved towards incorporating at least minimal documentation of file archives between May 1996 and July 1998, UCIVII’s practice retained the status quo and did not follow suit. As will be demonstrated this resistance to such change would begin to slowly but surely hurt the site’s popularity and credibility. The practical impacts were minimal but would be observed on an ongoing basis –- even by its second and final administrator and owner⁸.

Other initial sections included, in alphabetical order: ‘Hall of Fame’, ‘Hints & Tips’, ‘Links’, and ‘The Viking Scribes’. ‘The Ultimate Scenario Challenge’ would surface several weeks after the site’s founding⁹. A ‘Q&A’ section would follow in early 1997 along with a general game ‘Info’ and ‘News’ page. This is not to say that these three newest areas of UCIVII did not exist before their independent sections were founded. Rather, they were first apart of other sections or UCIVII’s homepage itself. The latter was especially true of ‘News’; it would not be until the fourth quarter of 1997 that it would finally be seen by the UCIVII administration as much more than a necessary but supplementary service to the file archives. Accordingly, nearly all of DelPrete’s site updates revolved around additions to the ‘Scenario’, ‘Maps’ and ‘MOD Packs’ sections. To be fair, news events were few and far between during this period.

An interesting aside here is a further explanation of ‘The Viking Scribes’. Its purpose was to provide a central location of stories from Civ fans describing their latest and/or most spectacular adventures in Civilization II¹⁰. Much knowledge of the Viking civilization was passed down from generation-to-generation by storytelling and this fact is therefore assumed to be DelPrete’s inspiration for the section’s name. No other Civ site during the period in question or markedly beyond would attempt to duplicate this coverage, effectively conceding exclusivity to UCIVII. In introducing the section DelPrete composed a passage that quickly gained notoriety with some in the Civilization community and respect from others.

"Vikings, Vikings, we[‘ve] got Vikings! Actually there are no Vikings here. If you would like a real, live Viking, please write to the [United States’] Pentagon; they store lots of them there"¹¹.

NO UPDATES TO SPEAK OF
Mike DelPrete was UCIVII’s owner and only staff member for the first three months of its life. However, the six weeks that ran from mid-June to the end of July 1996 saw a lack of site updates of any kind¹². Around the 3-4 week mark even many of the loyal site followers began to log on less and less, turning their attention and pageviews to other Civilization fansites. It was during this time that DelPrete came to the realization that he could no longer give the site the necessary attention it required to maintain its current status of operation, let alone progress beyond. While never before made public, he privately admitted as much¹³ to the person he would contact to offer the webmastering position of UCIVII to on August 5, 1998¹⁴. That person is Daniel Quick, a 15-year-old high school junior living in Ontario, Canada with whom DelPrete had conversed on several occasions via email. They had not and to this day never have met face-to-face.

LOOKING BACK
In mid-2000, DelPrete reflected on his days of complete control over the Ultimate CivII Site on the website of his then-current project, Glubco International ( http://www.glubco.com ).

"[The site] was developed for an extremely popular computer game (hence the name). It was, and continues to be, the hub of the Civilization gaming community. The original site was handed off to a friend to maintain, and since then has evolved… Some of my duties were [(a) c]ontent updates and administration[, (b) f]orum moderation [and (c) c]ontest and event organization"¹⁶.

The establishment of the DelPrete-Quick coalition became the first known collaborative effort to running a Civilization fansite on the Internet¹⁷. Following DelPrete’s lead of assuming an online persona other than the one he had in ‘real life’, Quick selected the nickname ‘The Emperor’ for himself. Quick’s day-to-day responsibilities on UCIVII include updates and responding to visitor inquiries. In retaining ownership, DelPrete continued to pay hosting expenses out-of-pocket and dealt with technical troubleshooting site-wise as needed. This was a partnership with very strictly defined and adhered to roles.

But the strength of the partnership would never be truly tested on a personal level. Initially, UCIVII’s financial expenditures that DelPrete continued to absorb were those that he was already paying to connect to the Internet from home month-to-month. This would not remain the case for long. In hindsight, the days of the Quick-DelPrete alliance are numbered from almost the beginning by unremitting financial strain.     [... Previous]   |   [Next ...]   |   [Endnotes]