“The friendliest play-by-post site on the internet!”

Groovy Gamers was founded on December 15, 2004. I played tabletop roleplaying games online for a couple of years on a few sites and decided to start my own. I decided to go for a very friendly atmosphere where all types of gamers and games were accepted. The site flourished very quickly and we had around 60,000 posts by the end of 2005. This version of the forum used the popular phpBB software. In early 2006, I started up a fresh forum using SMF software and we ran two forums for about six months due to some people not being comfortable with leaving. The original Groovy Gamers, which I called Version 1, ended up with around 70,000 posts. Version 2 ended up with around 220,000. We had about 700-800 members total between both forums.

I originally recruited on very few sites, mostly on the Atomic Think Tank (Mutants & Masterminds RPG forum). Several members later recruited from other sites. We had an initial moderator staff of three people: myself (I went by the username Endless Flight), Thayan, and Brother Shatterstone. We added BerkaZerka very soon after. The group was original called the Breakfast Club (not very original, I know). The original forum had games dedicated most of the time to Dungeons & Dragons, Mutants & Masterminds, and Star Wars. At any one time, we usually had anywhere from 15-25 games running. It ran very smoothly and we had very few problems along the way. For outstanding recognition, we had our own form of karma we dished out to each other: Groovy-Fu. I’m not sure who came up with the name, but it was classic. For a time, we also had a podcast created and hosted by Thayan called the Groovecast. It lasted about 20 episodes over the course of two years.

Notable members included (in no particular order): Lady Shatterstone, Keia, Sacremas, Colonel Blood, Vendetta, thevshi (most prolific poster), Cthughua, The Cyber Samurai, Cyclone, cassbackward, BraveDave2, Ender_Wiggin, Alea Jacta Est, Ronin84, Jongluer, BaboonBill, Harrigan, Kradedis, Ikoma, Cosmicarus, secretoracle (most prolific game), Magius del Cotto, Noober, Gomez, Firehorse, Gaea, Bobitron, Rowdy, Archer, Radical Dreamer, Doc, Kat, Asteroth, Katsumoto, USMC1075, and Beard. If I missed you, I apologize. I thank you all for your devotion to the site. I have kept up with quite a few members over the years and still talk to some more than ten years later.

I sold Groovy Gamers in April 2007 to an online business, and they ran it for about four years before closing it up. They did not do a good job with carrying on the traditions I had started. The domain name remained unused for about five years by several owners until I re-registered it in 2016. I tried twice to reopen the site, but my interested waxed and waned. I decided to start up this tribute to the original site so that it will remain online in some form.

I will be adding to this history as I remember and dig up more details. If you would like to share your experiences with the site, please do in the comments section below.

Thank you for reading,

Endless Flight