History of the Old Forum

This page provides a detailed history of the Old Forum, from its opening in February 2003 until its closure in October 2012.

## 2000 - 2002 (before the forum & early gamer interactions)

Miniclip launched on the 30th March, 2001, marketing itself as a site where visitors could find funny free games, movies and clips to send to their friends or put on their websites. The first game to be released on the site was Dancing Bush, which satired the then US president. It proved to be a huge hit with both adults and kids; and in many respects set the ball rolling for Miniclip. Dozens more games were added over the following weeks and months; attracting tens of thousands of casual gamers from around the world.

Miniclip offered a free mailing list which would notify subscribers whenever new content was added - but other than this they made little or no attempt to advertise their website. At the turn of the millenium, online advertising campaigns were very expensive and often bore little fruit unless done on a massive scale. As everyone was still using dial-up, overall internet usage was much lower and people's online sessions tended to be comparatively short, compared with after the advent of broadband. As such they were less likely to read or take the time to click on advertisements. There was also no social media or smart phones. Miniclip could only be accessed from home or the workplace. Miniclip opted to rely on word of mouth to advertise their site. Gamers would tell their friends about Miniclip in the playground, or email their colleagues at work, or share the link with high-school or college friends on early messaging services like IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo & MSN Messenger. The approach worked and by 2002 Miniclip had grown to be one of the largest gaming websites on the internet.

As Miniclip grew its games also increased in sophistication and it started offering multiplayer games. Prior to this, single-player games had only recorded high scores which you could attempt to beat, but now gamers could challenge one another directly in real-time, either one-on-one or in teams. To facilitate this, particularly in team-games, a basic chat box was added to a few games, but would only record a few lines of chat before a message was bumped off the screen and erased. More thourough discussions could be held on messaging services or chat rooms, however these were either private or erased once the session ended.

At the beginning of 2003, a high-school student came to Miniclip's office, based in London, do to his work experience with them. Asked for his opinion on how to develop the company further, he told them they should open an internet forum to give their many thousands of gamers a place to congregate and talk about the games they love playing. Internet forums, or message boards, were the new big thing on the online and had recently come into the mainstream, with most companies and large websites having one of their own, as well as countless free forums that had been set up by private individuals. They differred from chat rooms in that messages could be longer than one line of text, and are permanently archived once posted. Forums were, for the most part, publicly accesible and allowed people from all over the world to annonymously communicate with one another. Their unique structure of sub-forums and threads also allowed countless discussions to take place at any given time, within an organized environment. Miniclip liked the idea and began looking into opening their own.