Re: Welcome to C3G!!!
Since I was there for the start of TNT, I can verify some things and clear up some others. ;-)
A3n said:
TNT (Tried aNd Tested) was the first. Now I am a bit sketchy on the exact details of this as I wasn't on the site when it was around -- I also think it began on the previous site (before Heroscapers.com). Anyway I believe it was a small group of people that picked a custom card that they thought was finished & would playtest it to ensure it was balanced. If it was & was also costed correctly then it would get the TNT stamp & be released in it's own TNT labelled thread.
TNT started here. Way back when I first got to this website, slightly before the Hasbro Marvel Master Set even came out, I saw this Marvel customs forum, with a few threads here and there by guys like Doc Savage, which were largely inactive.
Me being me, I started my own custom thread and started bumping it just about every day, even if I was just talking to myself, and threw up a few hundred designs. Pretty soon Truth asked me if I wanted to be the Moderator of this section, and I accepted.
Also pretty soon, Eclipse with his City of Heroes customs and a few others, and Allskulls with lots of superhero customs, started their own custom threads and we started paying a lot of attention to what each other were doing. We provided each other with detailed reviews in each others' threads for each custom we posted. We started breaking things down into categories, and then Allskulls brought in a cool visual scoring system (number of skulls to assert the quality of the design).
This collaboration, which was added to when guys like Whitestuff and GreyOwl got active in the forum, evolved into TNT. TNT (again, started here on this website), stood for "Tried 'N True" customs. Basically we looked at customs and put them on "trial." This involved assessing the design, the card, and there even started to be some consideration for testing the cards out on the map, but we just didn't really get going with that very consistently and the burden of playtesting responsibility started slowing down each of the trials and they all started dying out.
This led to us transitioning to NM24. The idea of NM24 is that we wouldn't spend more than a day evaluating each custom (no more than 24 hours) so that it stayed light and fun. People would nominate customs, we'd discuss them, and then once a card got three
it was inducted into the NM24 vaults. Eventually discussions got more involved and quality standards increased and discussions started going on for more than 24 hours, but folks seemed OK with that.
I get sort of foggy here as I took about 6 months off from the site to finish my Master's Thesis for the University of Alabama. When I came back, and checked on NM24, it started getting more active than ever. GreyOwl was still there. Necroblade was pretty active (he'd joined TNT near the end, I believe), Whitestuff was still around, and new guys like Balantai, Griffin, Matt Helm, Garada, and Markb were getting pretty active (my old buddies Allskulls and Eclipse had by then moved on to other things - with Allskulls at least being lost in the initial transition to NM24).
Our discussions in NM24 became increasingly involved and there increasingly was a desire expressed by many of us to have a set of cards that were fully cohesive and consistent with each other. I think the example that brought it up was GreyOwl's Batman with a utility belt and some Kryptonite device on there that wasn't compatible with my Superman custom. Both were NM24, but they really didn't work well together, and that was just kind of disappointing.
I beat Griffin, Markb, and GreyOwl to the punch (I think all of them had similar ideas) and started the thread for the C3G project, and those guys, Whitestuff, Balantai, Garada, Necroblade, and Matt Helm all jumped on and history was made.
(I think that's everyone who was here from the jump).
Obviously several other amazing people have come and gone since then and made this project and incredible success that has, IMO, more than dwarfed anything accomplished by TNT or NM24. We wouldn't be here today if it weren't for those past projects helping us evolve to this point, but I truly believe we've
evolved to this point, and this is the height of accomplishment when it comes to Superhero Customs. I'm very proud and flattered to have been a part of it for so long now.