Pokémon Topaz - History of Pokemon Topaz

Pokémon Topaz is a game that has been in development since 2005, which is why Topaz is using mostly RSE mechanics. It all started when Tek (The Eternal Knightmare) created some topics on GameFAQ's Pokémon Emerald board asking for people to help with a Pokémon fan game that he wanted to create. He got RentCavalier and Falnax on his team and they were the three founders of Pokémon Topaz.

They set up a forum on InvisionFree named Topaz Realm and encouraged others to register after their topics on the GameFAQ's Pokémon Emerald board became popular but were deleted due to being off-topic. They saved as much information as possible and posted it on the new forum. Registration continued to grow at a steady rate.

At the same time, zeroality had his own website which was in-game information, covering all the handheld Pokémon games (but not the console games). It was a small website called EliteGurus.com, which was a holdover from when zero wanted to create a computer-related website. EliteGurus started as a final project in his college Dreamweaver class but soon evolved into a full website with a multitude of information about in-game Pokémon.

zeroality visisted the newly created Pokémon Topaz board one day in late 2005 and liked what he saw, and asked the staff at Topaz if they wanted to merge their forum with the EliteGurus website. This would benefit both parties, zeroality would get a discussion forum to go along with his website and Pokémon Topaz would be able to showcase their material better on a website and both sides would help each other become more established.

After several days of brainstorming, Tek and zero came up with a name for the new community: PokeRealm. The EliteGurus website went through a major redesign to match the forum style and PokeRealm was officially born. (Click to View Site Design). Pokémon Topaz continued to be a big part of the new PokeRealm community and enjoyed new heights of activity. About a month later, the administration decided to open a NetBattle server and that was history in the making. Within a few weeks, PokeRealm rose to the top of the list of most used servers. Only Smogon was able to maintain a higher number of users on their server, with PokeRealm being second on the list consistently - replacing Paradox Arena as the second most used server on NetBattle.

This continued for over a year and while PokeRealm moved its focus to a more battle-oriented site, Topaz remained the same and was a community within the community. People came and went but the spirit remained strong. With the shift towards NetBattle, PokeRealm got its second redesign. (Click to View Site Design).

As with all things that go up, they must also come down. zeroality was pulling all-nighters to do work to try and push PokeRealm even further. He even came up with the best site redesign yet, combining usability with visual design. (This design was adapted later and is now the one currently used on the Pokémon Topaz site.) Unfortunately, he underestimated the importance of sleep and soon had a breakdown. After a couple of weeks of going in and out of the nuthouse, he decided that he'd finally had it and gave PokeRealm to BlackTigress. Unfortunately, the site outgrew its shared hosting server and was shut down. The lack of technical expertise among the administrators, with zero gone, was very limited and they were unable to secure another server and move everything. So PokeRealm slowly died off, but another InvisionFree forum was quickly created to keep the remnants of the community together.

However, the undesirable element from PokeRealm found their way there as well and it was decided that if Topaz was to survive then it would need to be re-established as its own community. This is how PokemonTopaz.net was born and how it continues today. People come and go but the desire always remains, as does the vision of a game completed.

Page last updated on: 02-19-11 01:13:04 PM GMT