History of the Oni community: Difference between revisions

The existence of Marathon map editors naturally led to the creation of many, many maps. The abundance of maps led to sites that could store them all in one place. The premier site for this, starting in the spring of 1995, was the Marathon HyperArchive, run by Steve Wood in Boston, Massachusetts (to be exact, the HyperArchive was an HTTP front-end for the FTP server run by the Arizona Macintosh Users Group (AMUG), to make it easier for players to download maps and other files). Meanwhile, Bungie registered bungie.com and used it as their first permanent haven on the Web.

Shortly after this, another Marathon fan, Claude Errera, decided to mirror the site (combining the original HTTP and FTP servers into one, for improved reliability over AMUG's server) from his university computer in Portland, Oregon. He called this site the Marathon HyperArchive NorthWest. A second mirror site sprang up in 1996, the Marathon HyperArchive Midwest, run by Steve Campbell out of Oklahoma. Also that year, marathon.org was registered by Simon Brownlee and christened Marathon Central.

At the end of 1996, Claude went on an 18-month world-spanning trip with his family, so he left the HyperArchive NorthWest in Brownlee's hands. By this time, Wood's original HyperArchive had shut down, leaving the hosting of Marathon files in the hands of the NorthWest and Midwest mirrors. In 1997, Campbell merged his Midwest mirror with Brownlee's marathon.org and the NorthWest archive, leading to Marathon Central becoming the true center of the Marathon file hosting universe. Also in 1997, Bungie registered bungie.net, which eventually became their primary web site address (being redirected to from bungie.com).