We've been here before...

Remember 1999? The Euro happened, ITV killed off the News at Ten and Rod Hull died.

Unrelated but equally notable, Dynamix launched Starsiege:Tribes and shortly after three friends, Suds, Brit and Vaggabond, launched the UK's first dedicated Tribes community site, the original tribesplayers.co.uk As the game grew in popularity we then created the European Tribes site and the European Tribes League. We loved the game and the community that sprang up around it, and actually we weren't that bad at playing it either. We huddled round our massive CRT monitors, wondered about the cost of SLI Voodoo 2 and watched our ISDN pings like hawks.

Anyhow, that was all in the dim and distant past (internet-memory relative time) and some twelve years ago.

Life changes and people move on, jobs are gotten and careers begun - tribesplayers.co.uk got bought by a series of other people and finally returned to the domain-ether, even the usual collection of domain squatting companies gave up trying to make a buck off it; and as luck would have it, I idly typed it into my registrar's website and saw it was available... and here we are.

I still look back on the original Tribes as one of the first proper attempts at massively large scale multiplayer real time FPS gaming for the PC, and Dynamix did a brilliant job. I was always a heavy, preferring to give up any pretence of spinfusor skill with the ability to obliterate the enemy flag carrier with a well placed mortar round. I expect this time round, it'll be no different ;)

So over a decade later, I reckon it's time for another Tribes site - one dedicated to the UK and European communities that will undoubtedly spring up to support the new game, Tribes Ascend. Not promising anything fancy, but hell, I'm bored of Facebook pages. The difference being that this time around we don't necessarily have to hand code absolutely everything... it appears 'the internet' has at least made things a bit easier in that respect.

If you want to get involved (we're starting from scratch, so there's been no real thinking behind anything yet) we need web designers, builders, news reporters, league admins, translators, community moderators... the whole nine yards. Just drop me a line at [email protected]

My clan, Eat Electric Death (yes, the legendary EED) will undoubtedly be revisiting our collective Tribes love affair; embarrassing ourselves for all to see. Just don't try nicking our flag ;)