Aim4Game (A4G) was formed in late-1996⁶⁸, shortly after Quick became UCIVII's webmaster. It is a portal and host for at its eventual peak more than a dozen gaming fansites⁶⁹. In late January/early February of 1997, A4G lost its Civilization II coverage after fansite Civilization II Heaven (C2H) departed its ranks. C2H owner Michael D. McCart had elected to move his site onto his website design company's server, severing his closeknit ties with A4G at the same time. Only a few weeks later, Quick approaches A4G founder and Chief Administrator Nils “Doc” Tessin to have UCIVII take its place. “[W]hen I approached Doc about my interest in having UCIVII hosted there he was immediately receptive. Doc indicated that they were looking for a site to fill the… [gap] that [C2H] had left”⁷⁰. This sentiment is echoed in the remarks Tessin makes in profiling UCIVII as his gaming network's first 'Featured Member' beginning in mid-June of 1997.

“[UCIVII] is a new addition to [A4G], and very much a worthy one. [..] UCIVII is on a par with [C2H], if not better. If you own Civilization II, this is the place to go. [..] [T]his site is very prosperous, and is certainly worth a visit”⁷¹.

On April 12, 1997, UCIVII officially moves to A4G. The latter proudly notes that its newest member is “well-known and widely respected” in the CivII community. With an estimated average of 350 unique visitors per day⁷², the addition of The Ultimate Civilization II Site causes A4G's traffic to jump roughly 13% to just over 3,000 unique visitors per day⁷³ overnight. This increase would quickly prove to be a significant financial pain for the network still in its infancy.

Less than a month after UCIVII joins its ranks, A4G completes a move to a new hosting provider of its own, Nethosting.com. The reason: a $500US charge levied by its previous host for an increased use in bandwidth A4G consumed the previous month. Although comparable in daily traffic to A4G's other leading site, The Need for Speed Online (NFSO), its server disk usage was dozens and bandwidth consumption hundreds of times as much⁷⁴. In order to avoid future penalties of this kind, Tessin accepts a slower connection to the Internet for A4G75 in exchange for more affordable rates. Not only is UCIVII again proving costly on the pocketbook for its 'host-of-the-moment', but as a consequence its technical performance now too.

Still a newcomer to A4G, its Chief Administrator never asks Quick and his UCIVII website to depart as quickly as they had arrived⁷⁶. Although a perhaps unreasonable expectation at this point, UCIVII has not attracted desperately needed advertising funds to cover A4G's pre-existing hosting costs let alone the increase that UCIVII produces; in fact, commercial advertising was so limited in availability that they did not initially run on A4G's hosted sites⁷⁷ and will only begin running network-wide for the first time on June 1, 1997⁷⁸. A4G had been with a hosting provider with whom they had had before this incident a trouble-free association⁷⁹. A4G had moved once before, from a hosting provider based in Germany to one in the United States. This company provided a service that Tessin went as far as to publicly call “prestigious”, one that had made the network's continued growth possible⁸¹.

Arguably, a more practical solution would have been for Tessin to kick UCIVII off his network and Quick with it. Financially anyway, the cost of keeping UCIVII in A4G's fold was prohibitively high. Based on UCIVII's traffic history which Quick had provided⁸², this cost would more likely than not continue to climb. As a most certain example of A4G's increasing operating costs, members of the network's hosting program see the basic monthly cost of operating their sites from here alone jump more than 50% from $4.95US a month as late as mid-April, 1997⁸³ to $7.50US a month as early as June 17 in the same year⁸⁴. Tessin is a university student⁸⁵, no doubt to some degree in personal debt without adding A4G more to the burden. But Tessin takes an action that will hopefully keep hosting charges at bay and UCIVII in the network line-up. It is not known if the thought to hurriedly remove UCIVII had occurred to him, or if he had been pressured by any other network member to do so⁸⁶. Besides his eagerness to accept Quick's hosting application, there was another significant factor Tessin likely took into consideration in deciding to 'hold onto' Ultimate CivII at least for the immediate future.

ADDED RESPONSIBILITIES
While the final details of UCIVII's hosting arrangement were being hammered out, Tessin offered Quick a Junior Administrator position on the network staff. Tessin and Assistant Administrator Simon Garner were looking for some assistance in managing the growing operation. Garner himself is running the popular Need For Speed affiliate TNFSO which in itself was keeping him plenty busy. Tessin and Garner feel that Garner could delegate some of his tasks to Quick to improve efficiency and lessen the stress brought on by the network's rapid expansion over such a short period of time. After some contemplation, Quick accepts the position⁸⁷. While the Aim4Game hosting arrangement is more financially affordable for Quick than Glubco for DelPrete with UCIVII on board, the same cannot be said for A4G's technical reliability. A4G and several other sites hosted on one of Nethosting.com's servers crashes, which Garner⁸⁸ calls “severe” and warns A4G's visitor base that “[s]everal files have been destroyed so there might be some unwanted results”⁸⁹.

NETWORK GROWTH AND STAFF SHUFFLING
Within three months of Quick joining the A4G administrative staff and UCIVII at his coattails, Tessin has delegated all of his day-to-day responsibilities to either Garner or Quick. Other than in title and being the billing contact with A4G's host, still paying out-of-pocket for the difference between site operator payments and the total cost⁹⁰, his presence and power in the network gradually recede. Although their own titles never changed during the period in question, Garner becomes the de-facto Chief Administrator and Quick moves up the company's seniority ladder to Assistant. Although assigning non-profit organization status to its operation on its 'About' page⁹¹, Tessin informs those who read the network's 'How To Join' legal document that Aim4Game is a “legally organized company” in Germany owned by him that “does not mainly want to reach commercial goals”⁹² [emphasis added]. Despite this incorporation and an increasing number and type of ads being delivered across its network⁹³, there is little advertising revenue available for online gaming networks period. More critically, what was available went to centres larger than A4G.

In late July, 1997 Garner is given the opportunity to take over the network headship officially but flatly refuses. Tessin cites his reasoning for making the offer in the first place as a combination of time constraints and his own waning interest in A4G's objectives. Quick is then approached by Tessin to take up the post with Garner adding his support to the proposal. Quick accepts on the condition that someone else be responsible for the network's financial arrangements. Tessin agrees to retain this as his sole tie and responsibility⁹⁴ to the venture that he had started. At this point, the UCIVII owner/operator and A4G Junior Administrator had only been with the operation a few months. He had now taken control of the network's top administrative posting.

Sometime in the early summer of 1997, however, the financial strain on Tessin's pocketbook caused by A4G at last exceeds his means – and patience as well. He takes drastic action to redress this money drain. Without warning of any kind to Quick or Garner, the A4G 'treasurer' in all but title decides to perform a direct and definitive action. Timing, efficient monitoring and quick response all combine at whirlwind speed to stop Tessin's destructive effort in his tracks.

WERE IT NOT FOR LUCK
While working on yet another update to UCIVII, Quick receives an urgent instant message⁹⁵ from a technical administrator at Aim4Game's hosting service. The second party is noticing a mass deletion of files from A4G's server, starting with the directory containing UCIVII's content no less⁹⁶. Having both Garner and Quick as primary contacts on the A4G account in the records by this time, the webhost representative sees Quick online through his I-Seek-You (ICQ) contact list and wants to check right away whether or not this action is an authorized one. As part of his communication, the administrator notes that the connection is logged as originating in Germany. Quick knows that Tessin is a German citizen and resident⁹⁷.

Alarmed, and quickly putting the pieces of the puzzle together, Quick orders the webhost technician to terminate the connection and change all A4G administrative passwords without delay. In the end, only around one-third of UCIVII's content is deleted by Tessin prior to the forced abortion of this action⁹⁸. Unfortunately, some UCIVII content is permanently lost as a result but somewhat luckily most of that content was in the form of message board posts as opposed to other content. Quick is able to re-upload what he can within an hour⁹⁹. For the first time, it is publicly confirmed here that it could have been much worse. Quick considers:

“Up until this moment, UCIVII had been enjoying its longest period of uninterrupted stability. My confidence in this continuing was at an all-time high, as I'm sure it was in the minds of the Site's visitor base. Regretfully I had grown somewhat complacent in ensuring I had complete and up-to-date backups of the site's content.

Had the several elements that converged simultaneously on Tessin not occurred when they did, it is likely that UCIVII would have been devastated beyond resurrection. It is a safe bet that this would have been the case with the rest of A4G too”¹⁰⁰. In the wake of this event, Tessin abruptly apologies to Garner and Quick with Quick having informed Garner of what had taken place shortly beforehand. Tessin indicates he is no longer willing to cover A4G's mounting expenditures and as such will be terminating his association with the network effective immediately. He admits targeting UCIVII for deletion from the A4G server first as its share of the monthly bill is substantially higher than that of any other fansite hosted¹⁰¹. Brian Fox, a co-owner and operator of a Test Drive 4 fansite on A4G, answers Quick's frantic internal call to network members for someone willing to take on the burden and obtain direct access to and consulting status on the operation's day-to-day activities in return¹⁰². The added benefit of free hosting to Fox's fansite is undoubtedly seen as a bonus. Garner, Quick and even Tessin believe that this is too good to be true but cannot refuse the seemingly good fortune¹⁰³.

It would be too good to true. It will be then that Quick decides he has had enough of this arrangement.

THE LAST STRAW
Fast-forward six months. Quick puts in a request to A4G host Nethosting.com for an additional 50MB of space in anticipation of a pending jump in the storage space requirement for UCIVII¹⁰⁴. In a few days the response is laced with, as will be seen, understandable sarcasm. The staff at the Nethosting.com find it fascinating that request this comes in light of the fact that A4G's bill had not been paid for ten months straight. It is mid-October, 1997. This revelation shows that not only had Fox never made a payment on the network's behalf, but that Tessin had been acting similarly unbeknownst to anyone else. Worse still, it is evident that the monies sent to Tessin as hosting cost reimbursement – incidentally all collected and funnelled to him by Quick upon his becoming A4G Chief Administrator¹⁰⁵ – had been pocketed for other uses for some time. The only saving grace for Quick and the rest of A4G's personnel was the comparatively 'eleventh hour' timing of Quick's increased disk space request. The Nethosting.com representative that corresponded with Quick noted that A4G's service had been scheduled to be cut off the next day¹⁰⁶.

The webhost had not been able to successfully charge Teseein's credit card throughout this period of delinquency. Fox had never input his contact and billing particulars to the web-based system Tessin had given him access to. No one else at A4G had been given access to this system, let alone be made aware of its existence, until it was granted to Quick by the network's webhost to demonstrate their position¹⁰⁷. Still not believing his and his fellow fansite operators' luck to this point, he and Garner scramble not only to find new hosting arrangements for their own sites but also in informing the rest of the network of the circumstance and recommending that they follow suit. By the end of the month, all that remains of the A4G family are its biggest sites, Garner's and Quick's, the one co-held by Fox and a French-language Red Alert 2 one whose operator elects to have his creation 'go down' with the virtual ship¹⁰⁸.

In July, 2002 Quick will elaborate on what he had cited several years before as the reasoning for A4G's demise: “network instability, loss of fellow affiliation and financial strain”. The second reason given “is obvious: many of UCIVII's fellow affiliate sites left for better hosting arrangements elsewhere. Not only did this contribute to the first reason, it was also a result of it”. Further:

It was at this point that virtually… every gaming network was coming into most favourable financial contracts with advertising companies with clients eager to promote their products… to fan sites, gaming in nature or otherwise. Unfortunately for A4G, we needed a certain traffic volume and in turn name recognition to get offered one of these deals but it never came. We needed more affiliates, especially those already established, but they were leaving or had already left. Aim4Game was having trouble attracting new affiliates despite the continuous efforts on both my and Simon's parts. It was a classic Catch-22 spiral that was horribly cruel in the industry given the abundance of financial resources flowing through most other parts of it at the time.¹⁰⁹

Quick is able to persuade a surprisingly, consistently sympathetic webhost to keep A4G online for another month with nearly the same level of traffic it had experienced for more than half-a-year not yet paid for. They had, after all, been stiffed for in excess of at least $800US¹¹⁰ by the time Quick had made his turning-point technical request. Garner shuts his site down, later to be resurrected by another party, and quietly leaves the network behind¹¹¹. The once most junior A4G administrator is now its only executive member remaining and, by default, its reluctant owner. Beginning in December, 1997, Quick manages to ink a final two-month deal with A4G's webhost to keep its domains – a4g.com as well as aim4game.com – 'allive'¹¹².

The clearing out of the content that made up A4G and its affiliates was most effective as evidenced by A4G's however stagnant longevity. A4G's server will not go offline until March, 1999, all the while still hosting the aforementioned RA2 fansite. Quick believes that this fact is the result of a communicative breakdown between the billing and technical departments of the network's host¹¹³, and perhaps even a last ditch attempt to sell its forfeited domains to recoup some of their heavy losses¹¹⁴. Before that year had even begun Quick had resigned from A4G's administrative body, orphaning the virtual domain on the doorstops of an unlikely protectorate. UCIVII by then had been embraced by another gaming network that had proven and would continue to prove that it was exceptionally stable. It would be the Site's last re-location, its final destination before transforming into part of a greater endeavour.     [... Previous]   |   [Next ...]   |   [Endnotes]