The Hall of Light - The First Ten Years (2002-2012)

[CodyJarrett]

Surprising as it may seem, next Friday sees the tenth anniversary of the Hall of Light's public launch. The website went live on Saturday 14th December 2002 although work had been happening behind the scenes and offline earlier that year and before.

The HOL evolved from an earlier idea for a game database which was called the EAB's Amiga Game Database (AGD). There was already a website called the Amiga Games Database but it seems that RCK just picked a descriptive working title.

I had been working on a separate offline list of Amiga games which was prompted by Amiga Power's "Absolute Power" guide (http://amr.abime.net/issue_24 and http://amr.abime.net/issue_27). Amiga Power's guide attempted to list every Amiga game ever and it later became a book called, you've guessed it, The Official Guide to Every Amiga Game Ever (although it did miss out quite a lot of games!)



My Amiga list aimed to provide screenshots for all the games listed in Amiga Power's book and I created lots of the so-called Double Barrel Screenshots (DBS) with a titlescreen on the left and an in-game screen on the right. It also featured some Amiga Power mini-reviews. The list turned into a set of HTML pages which was viewed locally or from a CD but was only ever a personal project. It was called Those Were the Days and looked horrible. I also did screenshots for non-Amiga platforms.

Shield your eyes!



Anyway, I joined up with Twistin' Ghost and Walker who were doing something similar and we decided to create a combined database. We discussed it on a custom forum created using an old system called "ezboard". I found the phrase "Hall of Light" in an extremely obscure text and suggested it as a slightly pretentious name to suggest illumination of the dark recesses of Amiga gaming!

Eventually we joined forces with RCK who was coding EAB's game database system and that project became the Hall of Light.

The site looked like this before its launch:



The EAB was the meeting point for discussions about the new database. Others joined the core team; Codetapper, DrBong, andreas, Belgarath, Duke, Galaxy and Joe Maroni although some of the original team left after a disagreement.

This is what the site looked like after launch:



The HOL has also been built by its contributors who are listed on the team page (http://hol.abime.net/hol_team.php) and with help from others including Toni Wilen, the SPS team, the WHDLoad team and tomcat666 (more details here: http://hol.abime.net/hol_faq.php?section=thanksto).

The problem with any project like the HOL, which is done in spare time, for free and without any adverts, is that it's difficult to keep up the enthusiasm. This highly scientific interest graph demonstrates:



That's why I'm happy that the HOL is still here and that it has been joined by other associated Abime projects such as the Amiga Magazine Rack, Amiga Point of View, Amiga Games That Weren't and, more recently, Amiga Lore.

The site has also been improved over the years with new features like the game maps, magazine scores, more screenshots and lots more. Still, it's not complete and the ongoing quest for accuracy continues.

Now all we need is for RCK to add some of the other features we're still waiting for!

[DH]

Happy birthday HOL for next Friday

This is truly a milestone that has been achieved for the Amiga Community. Without HOL, the main team and all the contributors HOL certainly wouldn't be where it is today.

Thanks to RCK, CodyJarrett, Codetapper, DrBong, andreas, Belgarath, Duke, Galaxy, Joe Maroni, Twistin'Ghost & Walker, the main HOL team, for making it what it is now, you have all done a fantastic job over the last 10 years, and I'm sure there'll be another 10 years of excellence to come.

Thanks also to the Super Contributors KillerGorilla, dlfrsilver, mai, TheCyberDruid, DemonHellraiser, logix, lilalurl & silkworm for their commitment and hard work over the years, and finally a big thanks to all the contributors far and wide who have painstakenly worked their socks off to help bring HOL this far.

And thanks to Toni Wilen, the SPS team, the WHDLoad team and tomcat666 and everyone else involved in making this project a reality

[Predseda]

You guys already became legends.

[Retro-Nerd]

Amiga with HOL? Just like the internet without Google. Great retrospective view, Cody. I've never seen pics of the early Amiga database attempts.

[lilalurl]

Congratulations to everyone involved, even those "just" reporting some errors (it can be very useful).


I cannot imagine how much time the core team spent to build the main part of HOL. When I see the time I need to do just a few modifications and create a few entries, I am amazed that some people spent hours and hours during 10 years doing that.

[dex]

Hall of Light is one of my most visited sites, congratulations to everyone who made this great archive possible. I hope you will be able to achieve everything you planned with the site and that it will continue going strong during the next 10 years (hopefully even more ) Keep it up!

[mombasajoe]

Happy birthday HOL. It´s so nice that you exist.

[Telemachus]

A PDF of that would be nice.

Also Happy Birthday HOL

[Dunny]

A PDF of collected HOL info would be Aces :-)

D.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by Telemachus

A PDF of that would be nice.

Also Happy Birthday HOL

It's a good book - got a copy on my shelf. I need a scanner

[quahappy]

Blimey. I had a copy of that one too back in the day. I'm surprised it's not PDF-ed already and yes, a WWW search revealed zilch. Is it rare now?

[ransom1122]

Congratulations to all involved. Now where's my free pdf? Lol

[DrBong]

@Cody
What's happened to a few of the images in your first post? (see below and a full archive of your post HERE). Did they go missing after EAB was migrated to the new server a couple of years back??!!