Back in around October, 2002, a few members of the Blueyonder gaming community set up the #byxbox IRC channel in preparation for the beta testing of Microsoft's Xbox Live service. The Blueyonder Xbox forums had been becoming increasingly active after a very sceptical reception to the Xbox. A few of us stubborn forum users continued to battle against the tidal wave of doubters and our tenacity was rewarded when the forums became the most active of the console forums on the Blueyonder Games website. When the beta testers got their kits, and we all registered Gamertags, the #byxbox irc channel became our meeting place to arrange gaming sessions on the few games that were around at the time - the main ones being MotoGP Online Demo and Mech Assault. It soon became difficult to know who was who, with some people not being able to get their Blueyonder forum names as Gamertags. So, in November 2002, Scouseknight launched the first phase of the community website, which was a simple Gamertag cross-reference database to allow people to record both their Blueyonder names and Gamertags. More and more features were added to this Gamertag facility and by December 2002, byxbox.com was born, and shortly afterwards, a large fully-featured website was launched with the ability to post news, add games reviews e.t.c. byxbox.com remained largely unchanged for a long period of time, and it became clear that it needed a new lease of life, which prompted the start of the second incarnation of the site. Chas submitted a design that was eventually used along with some graphics from Matty P. Some new features were added and a few other tweaks took place, but the new design was basically grafted onto the original coding done by Scouseknight. About the same time there were murmurs about Blueyonder closing down, but until we had official confirmation there was little we could do, so the site was relaunched under the byxbox name. Unfortunately it was only a matter of weeks later that the news broke confirming the closure of the Blueyonder gaming service and we had a few short weeks to decide what to do. A number of discussions took place on the forums weighing up the options which were discussed by the community. It came down between two options - Going it alone - potentially hazardous as there are plenty of other Xbox sites out there, would we be able to survive? Or attaching ourselves to another GSP, Wireplay being the one of choice. Again could be a bit risky in the current climate with GPSs falling by the wayside, would we end up homeless again? The result of the final vote should be quite apparent and after yet more discussion on a new name, myxbox was born in October 2003. The only major difference from the revamped byxbox site and myxbox, apart from the name change and some more new graphics, (this time from Benten) was the addition of the forums. Although, subsequently Chas added a few more features and the tournaments section was rewritten from scratch. Then in April 2005, with the forthcoming launch of the Xbox 360 discussions took place on what direction to take the site, which ended up with the somewhat contraversial idea of dumping the main site altogether and just using the forums. The idea was to get back to basics, the old site was very underused, the community and its members were always the main focus since it's inception and as such were centred around the forums, so the main site got forgotten a bit and a lot of its features hardly got used. There wasn't anything on the main site that couldn't be done through the forums and however contraversial the decision, it made a lot of sense, so the site went. Finally at the end of November 2005 after a few delays, the new straml;ined site, ie: the new forums, were launched. That brings us up to the present day. Who knows what the future will hold. We'd like to end by saying a big thank you to everyone that has droppoed in on our small corner of the world wide web, and Live community, whether you've stuck around since the byxbox days or only just arrived. |