Written by Citizen Alpha Wednesday, 10 August 2011 15:39

The Citizens Coup Network was originally created in 2003 by Violent Dave as a personal website, web log, and medium to broadcast his UO Autobiography from being an avid player of an Ultima Online MMORPG emulated server, In Por Yelm. A few short months later the site was taken down due to lack of hosting and lack of interest from all parties involved. Eventually the emulated server shut down and was reduced to just a forum which only lasted a few months before the forum was shut down as well. The community from the forum was scattered to the wind.

At the time, two of that forum’s users and long time Ultima Online players Tarzan and Bud Weiser already had a site up called Fromunda.net that was not seeing much traffic. Violent Dave came on board giving the site a much needed design overhaul and the three set off to reassemble the shattered community. Not much headway was made in the months to follow; few members of the community survived the transition to the new website.

The trio continued to press forward until eventually Bud Weiser fell off the face of the earth and landed in WoW rarely to be seen again. Tarzan and Violent Dave were left manning the helm but without much direction the site was quickly dying. More months had passed and hits, posts, and updates were few and far between. Eventually the two mustered some additional motivation to press onward and continue to produce content regardless of the lackluster community involvement.

More time had passed and another website the community was known to frequent, wtfman.com put out an open call for new front page writers. Due to the legacy within the MMORPG community, Violent Dave jumped at the chance to submit an article. Afterwards the interaction around Fromunda.net was seeing growth and the Fromunda Network Gaming league was formed with the idea of running network games across a Hamachi network, tournament style, with front page reports with game play-by-plays.

The popularity of FNG was a big improvement and community involvement began to pick up. Eventually Violent Dave was picked up as a writer for wtfman.com. Violent Dave continued to write for both websites. As the FNG tournaments continued, while researching a game for next month, Violent Dave and Tarzan came across GTA 2’s network multiplayer. This eventually lead into the discovery that GTA:San Andreas also has a multiplayer modification along with MMORPG style game servers, going back to the roots of what the community enjoyed.

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