Many, many moons ago (almost a year, actually), I wandered across an advertisement within a friend's gaming magazine that caught my eye. The notion of a handheld with a touchscreen, as well as offering Internet access, instantly sold me. Not long afterwards, I purchased a game.com, found it even more "technically neat" than I'd expected, and decided to fire up a website in praise of this great machine. Slight's Unofficial game.com Homepage was born that day.

And, like any newborn, did it grow quickly! Having quite a bit of free time on my hands in those long-ago days of lore, the site seemed to be reinventing itself on a daily basis, with metachanges (such as behind-the-scenes HTML tweaks) as well as content additions (new reviews, screenshots, sounds). The recent lull in Com activity, along with a new career, has resulted in a slowed-down pace for the site, but it sure has come a long way in those few months!

With growth comes growing pains. SUgcH was a case study in evolution, with the site growing and expanding without any real background plan for how to proceed. The growth itself was the plan. Unfortunately, that leads to messy HTML coding - for example, each subpage was loading its own background image, when a single image (preferably in a "shared" folder) could have done the task. It was time to revamp SUgcH.

When I first decided to take on this monumental labor, I thought I would completely start over with the website design, leaving only the content (reviews and such) untouched. I was going to pick a new colorscheme, drastically alter (or even nix) the frames, pick new "trademark touches" (I consider the right-oriented "bubble HR lines" to be a signature of SUgcH), and, of course, change the site's name. Slight's Unofficial game.com Homepage seemed a fine name at the time of the page's creation, but had subsequently become widely parodied and lacking in flavor. Big changes were in store!

What I didn't consider was that the site had taken on a life of its own. Many authors speak of their characters reaching a point where they "write themselves", where the author knows how the character will react in a given situation based on previously-written material. At such a point, the author can feel trapped by his own creation. The storyline might call for the character to do X, but the character should do Y. I was starting to feel this way about the site! SUgcH had grown and taken on a definite character in its young lifespan, with its various oddities and quirks. As I worked on a replacement site, nothing seemed to live up to the original. SUgcH had evolved to perfectly fit both myself and its job, and anything else came across as being forced into its niche.

Will there be more changes in the future? Of course! Life is change, and this website is very much alive to me. Somewhere down the road, "adolescent" will give way to "young adult", and then to "adult", and so forth. The character of the COMPENDIUM will keep growing, and I will write the story around it. Just as it tells me to :)