A Little History

Once upon a time, there was a site named ThePurpleCube. It was founded in 2008, after the GameCube was commercially dead, to create an open and welcoming resource for one of the most underrated consoles of all time. And we succeeded - it was bar none the best GameCube download site on the web.

Seeing the oppurtunity to create a similar high quality communities, our other staff members created sites for the other consoles of the 128-bit generation. Project Black Tower was founded to cover everything PS2 related and Direct Xbox was founded to cover the original Xbox. As great of a resource as these communities were, the sites were a lot of work to maintain and remained small communities, many of which were a member of ther other sites as well.

In 2010, we decided to bring all the sites under one umbrella under the name 128bit.me. The merge was succesful and our download sections were very complete and much better organized than other other link sharing forums - in major part to List Monkey, a PHP tool custom developed by long time staff member Rooskie.

The file sharing forums that proliferated in the first decade of the 00s were about to have a defening blow. On January 19, 2012, visitors to Megaupload.com, the most popular file sharing site and where the majority of our downloads were hosted, were greeted with a notice posted by the FBI, informing them that the domain was seized.

Scared of repurcussions, many other file hosts closed up shop. Many link sharing forums also called it a day and closed up shop. After all, just like 128bit.me, their download sections were full of dead links and no way to determine what was on Megaupload and what wasn't.

We tried to regroup and reorganize but never really succeeded in creating the realiable, well organized resource we had before. It was also terrible timing because many of us, who were students during the earlier years of the sites, were beginning to feel adult responsibilities and didn't have the time to dedicate to something that made no money.

I felt bad leaving the site in poor condition with dead links and fewer staff members but I didn't really see a way forward. I rarely visited and the other staff members were the only reason anyone visited the site at all. Forums, the preferred online community of the first decade of the 00s, also began dropping in popularity. While old members would often check in on the site, little discussion was happening and the download section had dead links everywhere. Last year, our dated install of SMF Forums started attracting a ton of spam - in the tens of thousands of posts. I did what I had to - put the site in maintenance mode, leaving site visitors only with a message promising a return - sometime?

The Return

If you are reading this and you were a member of 128bit.me before the Megaupload shut down, you probably feel a slight amazement that I'm actually bringing 128bit.me back. After all, how many download sites contemporary with 128bit.me are still around?

I'm super happy to finally launch something. It's been an off and on effort for a few years. My vision has always been to bring the site back with the downloads separate from the forums. After all, uploading isn't the hard part. Posting to the forum in an organized fashion is.  Forums are good at discussions but horrible for organizing data.

At my job, I work with Wordpress and initially began to use that to construct something. But Wordpress can only do so much functioning as a database and my solutions involved hacky code that wouldn't survive Wordpress updates. That didn't sound like the low maintenance solution I was seeking.

Then I discovered a piece of software named ProcessWire, designed specifically for using as a database. I instantly fell in love with it and knew it was perfect. Manipulating the GameCube release table from Wikipedia into Excel and using Processwire's import tool, I was able to create a database of every game released tagged with developer, publisher, regions released and the corresponding dates, in just hours. Mind. Blown.

In addition, the game data and the download data are completely separate. I can remove and add downloads at will, without touching the game's information.

So... welcome to 128bit.me Phoenix Beta, what I hope is a sustainable revision to 128bit.me. Head over to the forums to create a new profile and introduce yourself whether you are old or new!

~cube