BrainKing History

If you were with us since the very start of BrainKing, you probably remember all important events which happened during last four years. If not or you are a new member, you can get some key information right now. I have decided to write this entry because of my own fragile memory too - it might be interesting to recall these events after 10 years.

• April 2002 - the very first element of future BrainKing structure was designed. Based on experiences from other game sites, I had an ambiguous notion of the basic set of BrainKing feature list and started to gather all missing information and resources. By the way, besides Liquid and me, there was a third guy who was meant to develop with us, mostly a 3D interface of game pages, but it turned out to be a side cut, so we were finally established as a two-guys team. A curiosity - when we wanted to find a good name for the game site, the third guy came up with the name PlayBrain (probably after reading too much PlayBoy issues ) and it was used as a working title until the final BrainKing name was definitely set by me. I guess it sounds better. Although it might be harder to pronounce for non-English speaking people.


• September 2002 - the domain BrainKing.com was registered which meant that the BrainKing name was definitely set and established. A test environment of the beta version of BrainKing was temporarily launched on Liquid's home computer and connected through his cable modem (256/64 kbps line) - not the fastest connection but good enough for a couple of testers who were trying to play the first games and reporting some initial bugs. The real BrainKing server was built and put to our server housing company. We were lucky that our contract contained a line about an unlimited data traffic - I was formerly thinking that a 50 GB/month limit could be enough since we only transfer HTML pages and a couple of small pictures, there were no big downloads. I couldn't be more wrong, of course - the real current traffic is 25-30 GB a day and growing every month.


• October 2002 - the BrainKing site was officially launched, providing only 5 game types (Chess, Corner Chess, Fortress Chess, Horde Chess and Five in Line), several discussion boards, a message box and BKR charts. No tournaments, no fellowships, no regular tasks. Only English and Czech version. And many bugs. However, it was kind of a success, especially due to the site speed - there were only a few users, there was no big load. From my current programmer's point of view, the source code of that starting version of BrainKing was awful - I still don't understand how it could be working at all. At least, there was a really big place for an improvement. Due to the lack of resources (there were no paying members at the beginning, of course) everything was running on one computer - BrainKing itself, database, backup service, mail server, etc.

(to be continued)