The Bubblegum Crisis Center > Extras
Site Memories
In here you will see some things that were once very bright and very shiny in BGCC's past but are now nothing more than ancient relics.
Celebrative Pictures
Like cheap Hallmark cards, we used to make these to celebrate events back in the day...
100 000 Hits
Wow, imagine getting excited over such a tiny number as that. Well that's how things were back then when BGCC was nothing more than a tiny fansite. I think it took us about a year to actually get there, so it must've been around November-December 2002. I think it was "Dracula666" (or at least that's what his Internet name was back then) who Photoshopped this up... he was new to Photoshop at the time, don't judge him based on something like this, he's done some spectacular pictures in his time since.
200 000 Hits
I think it took us half the time to rack up another 100 000 hits to get up to 200 000... it was exciting then, laughable now. Chris Turley drew up this pic, it features his original character Natasha Romanov from his Instrumantatum Vocalle fan fiction series on the right. This is a black and white version, but a colour version was also drawn up, though I can't seem to find it on my PC... I guess it ran away or something, I guess. And I'm not 100% sure, but I think someone else drew up another 200 000 hits congratulations pic as well... it was such a long time ago though.
1st Birthday
It's been a long, long time since we actually opened BGCC now... didn't think we'd get this far actually. I'm pretty sure there are other birthday pics somewhere but I can't seem to find them on my PC. This is the only one I could find but I do know more birthday pics were made. Either way, this pic was made by "Dracula666" and it's just drips with that feeling of a fansite where the people who run it don't actually know what the hell they're doing at all. We've come a long way since then though, a VERY long way and into places we never thought we'd end up...
Xmas
I used to recycle this picture every Christmas lol... But that's okay, it's a nice picture... aside from the really ugly text. I'm pretty sure we had some other Christmas pics drawn up by some of our forum members back in the day but I can't seem to find them anywhere which is a shame. Maybe someone out there has them saved onto their PC cause I apparently don't. If you do, send me an email or something so I can add them to this page and we can all get drunk and dance a happy jig or something...
Xmas 2003
Oh hey, look, another Christmas pic. This one was drawn up by Flynt and features the characters of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040. 2003 was quite a popular year over at the forum and we had gotten quite a few artists in there who were all happy to draw up some nice pics for the site. Like I said with the last pic, there are still other pictures that were drawn which I still can't find, hopefully they'll turn up somewhere in the future. Specifically, there was another Christmas pic drawn up for Christmas 2003 by Chris Turley and coloured by SadiPriss which I can't seem to find anywhere...
BGCC Site Designs
Be very afraid of this section, it contains some very disturbing imagery of really crappy site designs...
BGCC version 1
Wow, the first ever site design... here's a fun little fact, this design was carried over from my first web site called "Rogue Squadron Central" and simply given a new colour scheme... a very gray one, urk. Man, as I look at this pic I can spot some pretty crazy things. Up in the very top-left corner is this animated gif of a clip of the opening sequence to Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040... and then I spot a mention of a Yahoo! Group I forgot I ever created lol, and mention of some other Yahoo! Club and talk of some other stuff. There's also mention of "Dracula666," a friend of mine who used to help me out with the site when it started. I think I used GeoCities page builder to make it... unk.
BGCC version 2
Now here's the second design for BGCC... and it's still REALLY gray, urk. The biggest difference between this design and the first one is that this one required people to use a resolution of at least 1024x768. That was the first and last time I had made a design like that sine a great deal of people still only used 800x600 even back then. If you notice, I even talk about it in the news post within the actual screenshot itself lol. And by the looks of it, I'm still with GeoCities at this point, and I think this design was made using Microsoft Frontpage... unk.
BGCC version 3
Here's the third design, it looks like a scaled down version of the second one... because it is. Though from reading the news posts in the screenshot, it looks like I've moved out of GeoCities and into some place called Gizba which I can hardly remember at this point. I think it may have been the very last free hosting service I was with before I got a domain name and a proper paid host, etc. Still really gray, and got that really bad header pic and urk... what was I thinking? It's really hard for me to look through all of these screens... they're just so bad!
BGCC version 4
You know, it kind of amazes me how much gray these old designs have... but then suddenly I add even more gray to it somehow! That huge header pic was too big and too dull, but it's all in the past now so who really cares. You can tell by this one that I was really experimenting with how you create and design web site, and how not to do them. I think the fact that it's not even been a year since I opened the site at this point and I'm already on the fourth design says something about that too. As you can see by the uri for the site under the title, I'm using cjb.net to create one of those fake looking domain names... but not for long, after this the site takes another step into the right direction.
BGCC version 5
The site continues to evolve and still has far too much gray. But lookie, lookie, by this time it looks like we had the forum up and running. And even better, the uri for the site is now www.thecrisiscenter.net and things are progressing into the right direction. I have a domain name, I have a community forum and a paid host... speaking of which, I can't remember what the name of my first paid host was, all I can remember is that their website was very orange. The really interesting part of this design was the header. It happened to move left and right and reveal more pictures on it depending on how you moved the mouse.
BGCC version 6
There's no running away from that gray it seems, it's everywhere and it doesn't seem to be going away. The hit counter seems to be missing from this shot, though I think in this design I had moved it so it always appeared at the very bottom of the page. As always the site graphics are really bad... which isn't very good considering that I was going through a multimedia course at the time. At least I know by this point I had moved on from Frontpage and was most likely using notepad to edit the pages in raw html form. I'm also spotting a lot of things that we probably shouldn't have had on the site which are long gone now...
BGCC version 7
By this time the sites popularity is skyrocketing and I think it may have something to do with the fact that the level of gray has been decreased quite a bit... or maybe not. One of the news posts says how this design is #8... it's kind of true, but not. This design and the design dubbed #7 back then basically look exactly the same with the only real difference being the navigation bar on the side which looked slightly different. So I guess the version in the screenshot could be called version 7.1 or something. Either way, you can spot some nice Christmas pics in this screenshot.
BGCC version 8
See, now here's where the sites design got really interesting, I like this one, I mean aside from the consistently bad header pic of course. Either way, there's a lot more blue and it looks really good... and I have no idea how I came up with it lol. Another great thing about this design is that it's going to be the last time we ever see all that gray, but it does seem to work pretty well on this particular one. Of course now that I think about it, this design does seem great when I look at it now, but I'm pretty sure it was a bit of a nightmare to handle back then with all of the funky stuff I was trying to do, the browsers back then couldn't handle it.
BGCC version 9
I think this is around the time I really started to get things standardised in terms of web site designs... and look, no gray, none at all!... aside from that scrollbar, but that's not really part of the site design. Either way, as you can see, this site design was heavily integrated into the forum which was becoming quite popular and had lots of crazy things happening in it. Speaking of which, this screenshot has captured the very moment when Blue Confusion became a moderator over at the forum. From the look of this screenshot, there was quite a lot going on at the time.
BGCC version 10
Ah, now this design was great, I loved this one. I had gotten all of the colours just right, the right blue, the right red and the right amount of black. A lot of people loved this colour scheme, so much in fact that someone made a nice mobile phone theme out of it lol. The screenshot we have on file right now isn't actually a proper screenshot. Apparently I had forgotten to take a screenshot of a working model of the site before I changed the design so... oops. What you're seeing now is a template I made in Photoshop for the original site design itself before I implement it. Either way, it looks pretty damn good doesn't it.