As far as my origin story goes, it's a long one.
When I was about seven years old my parents brought me to Disney...and I hated it, haha. I refused to go on ANYTHING that went indoors because I was traumatized by the bat tunnel in Big Thunder of all things
Fast forward to when I'm 11...I'm still too intimated to go on the mountains or anything like that, but I went into the Tiki Room for the first time, and a spark was born. The winter of that fateful second trip I was browsing Google as a 12 year old and was searching around for what I recently discovered to be the Tiki Juice Bar, something that I didn't even realize was a thing when I first went to the Tiki Room, so no Dole Whips for 11 year old Tiki haha. Anyways I want as much info on the juice bar as possible which led me to a little site by the name of MouseInfo.com. I clicked on the forums and registered as #1tikiroomfan. You can imagine as a 12 year old my vocabulary was terrible and my social skills were worse, but somehow I found a niche in that community of mostly 30-something disgruntled OC natives and found myself with the branded nickname of "Tiki".
After a MASSIVE ego-boost via being invited to be a moderator on the short lived but beloved condorflats.com, I started up a VERY small community on Proboards and frequented the then thriving RCT2 forum community. My proboards stuff I mostly did with
@Snoopy, and my "flagship" site was UTR aka UnderTheSun, a place to talk about anything, well...Under the Sun in the realm of pop culture. Snoopy and I basically carried UTR on our backs with a number of people who would come and go for about five freaking years before I gave up on it. As for the RCT sites, I found some success by posting a series of short stories using RCT screenshots, but controversy came when a hub site in the community went up for sale and I caused a stink about a new person buying the site out who we didn't know because someone else who I did know was in the running to buy out the site. That caused the whole site to shutdown, so if I'm being honest with myself, I probably am somewhat to blame for the death of the RCT2 forum community in general. Not my proudest moment
Anyways, around that time I was frequenting a Disney site called MouseTimes and had created an Armchair Imagineering competition called "The Imagineer". Much like The Sole Imagineer, it was directly inspired by The Apprentice. The competition became so sucessful that it was actually advertised on the front page of the site in subsequent seasons with prizes such as Imagineering books to those who won, but The Imagineer never really took off.
What did take off though, was a game I was invited to be a guest host on within a site called VisionsFantastic. That game was So, You Want to be an Imagineer. Indeed, the first season really wasn't anything to write home about with the exception of a couple key events. The first was obvious frontrunner
@Basketbuddy101 being eliminated in fourth place for designing a roller coaster in the place of Redwood Creek Challenge Trail that I thought crossed a line of realism. This elimination helped CostaFreak become the first true underdog of the game, led the way to DisneyFreak59 winning the first season in style with the iconic Legends of the Lost Army project under her belt, and the notion that anyone could win SWYTBAI in play going forward.
The first couple seasons where I was officially co-host were hot messes due to the fact that my co-host was posing as an Imagineer but came forward at the end of season three to announce he was basically living a lie and wasn't in any way affiliated with Disney. Yea...that put a damper on things, especially because for some reason he had a huge issue with Basketbuddy's length of projects which led to what I believe to be the most lopsided season ever of SYWTBAI...no offense intended to winner MadAboutMickey, of course.
Season Four was actually a home run which I was free to run on my own, and to this day I attest that if season four hadn't been the success it was I'm not sure Armchair Imagineering as a whole would be where it is now. Season four saw the first full cast of 13 players, plus the epic rivalry between Basketbuddy and
@KingMickey which lasted all the way until the final two with a very close victory for Basketbuddy. After a really rocky 5th season the rest was history when season six introduced team dymanics.
To make a long story short, after season ten VisionsFantastic essentially left us to our own devices. They were gracious enough to host a forum for us to continue for two more (rather wonky...) seasons of the game before the forum we were left with was overrun with bots and the community was forced to migrate over here as the best option to continue the game.
And I guess the rest is history, haha. I will say this is BY FAR the most active and thriving community I've been a part of in my long history. What others have said about how supportive and positive people here are is completely true. The hype for season 18 is absolutely palatable, and I can't wait to see where this community takes my game in future seasons!
