The SCRAMM forum, and how I once knew an Internet celebrity before he was famous.
So, last night, a friend shows me Potter Puppet Pals (here and here), and then I remark that hey, I used to know the guy who made that! (over the Internet, though. Not in person.) As it turns out, Trapezoid used to be a regular over at the SCRAMM forum, where I frequented circa 1999-2001 or so. (SCRAMM, for the ignorant, was an adventure game engine that never ended up being released, most likely because it was WAY too ambitious a project.)
Want proof? Thank you, archive.org! (Mind you, you can’t really click on any of the links to the individual messages. If you’ve got a lot of spare time, you could always sift through some of the ones that ended up being saved. By the way, I’m Squinky, just so you know.)
Trapezoid then went on to become an Internet celebrity who made a lot of funny Flash animations, and I went on to… finally finish Cubert Badbone. Whoo.
As for other people who frequented that board… Trumgottist and Erwin (whom I used to always confuse with Erkki) have gone on to be fellow SLUDGE developers, ComradeNarf has been doing voices for Project Joe (last I heard, anyway), Stacy made SLUDGE tools that are now hosted by yours truly, and Brand X (you can’t see any of his posts here, but he’d always sign them with “Long time reader, nth time poster” and that was funny) became MrColossal and now does loads of cool AGS stuff. I still wonder what happened to Neole, KS, WorldMaker, Outrageous Evan Courageous, and – oh, what the hell – James Slaughter himself.
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The Little Girl Nobody Liked
Facetious Nonsense
Hey Squinky, long time no see, although I wonder if you even remember me. I used to hang in the SCRAMM forums as well, and I remember most of those names you mentioned. Actually I just Googled for “SCRAMM” because I started wondering about it again. I didn’t visit the forum much anymore near the end, so maybe it’s that, but maybe the thing just did go offline without any warning whatsoever. It still feels a bit sad to think about it…
I haven’t spoken with anyone since, didn’t know Trapezoid had become famous, but the 2 Flash cartoons seem high quality animation, so that makes sense. I’ll look into him and the others with your links and Google later… sort of curious now.
Apparently you finished Cubert Badbone. I have to admit I don’t remember specifics, but I remember the name. 
I’ll see if I can try it out later. I’d better put this site in my bookmarks.
Take care,
Retodon8
I remember your name.
I remember your name too… okay, I didn’t until I went and looked at the old forum posts at archive.org shortly after posting this blog entry all those months ago, but I do recall peeking at your website to see what you were up to these days. Anyway, nice to hear from ya again!
I hung out at the SCRAMM IRC channel! I had live coverage unlike you all! (as netmonkey, btw)
It’s interesting to see who ended up splitting up in two directions between Adventure Game Studio and SLUDGE from the SCRAMM… incident. ¬¬
Trapezoid ended up joining the AGS camp for a while, and made a game (Satan Quest) but now he’s pretty engaged on his Lemon Demon stuff and he has abandoned us.
Also, I didn’t know Stacy was involved in SLUDGE-related activities. I used to talk to her a while back during those SCRAMM years, and I think she’s still on my AIM list somewhere…
I was mostly a lurker on the Scramm boards, but I threw around my moderator-wanna-be self over on the GLUMOL boards, swearing that Glumol would make it one day and defending Glumol against the nay-sayers. I gave up on Glumol about a week ago. [rolls eyes]
Hello hello! SCRAMM was QUITE the engine, wasn’t it? Those archives are creeping me out a little.
I do remember you and Cubert and whatnot. It’s good to see you’re still in the games game. Unfortunately I was never as good at game production as I hoped I would be, but oh well!
Whoa! It’s Trap! You know, I saw that video of you lip-synching to a fast-fowarded chipmunky version of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” a little while ago, and it made my month.
Edmundo: I hung out on IRC too (which is where I usually got to chat with James Slaughter and such). And I’ve still got Stacy on my AIM list as well.
I’d say the post-SCRAMM split went three ways: some went over to AGS, those who wanted higher-resolution graphics than AGS went over to AGAST (that would be me), and those who thought GLUMOL would see the light of day. Eventually, AGAST, having hardly been updated, got replaced by SLUDGE and WME, and GLUMOL obviously never made it, so its proponents flocked to either of the big three engines.
Vive’ Glumol !
Well, I’ve never been that hard to find. I’ve continued to use the same psuedonym, and have only been a short google search away…
I was thinking about all of this again, after being almost violently disturbed by Trapezoid’s Wikipedia page. His mom must be so proud… Anyway, I wrote up a bit about it on my blog, including a (very) brief history of SCRAMM and a few people that I knew about that you don’t have mentioned in this post…
http://blog.worldmaker.net/2006/aug/17/ye-olde-scramm-bar/