I started ripping because I really wanted to make a game based of the Wacky Races NES game, but no where had the sprites. So I went and got them myself. Submitted them to TSGK and nes-snes-sprites.com and was pretty pleased as punch when they got put up.

N-finity was like THE man during his time so him accepting my work meant a HUGE deal for me. However I found that it was a bit too hard to see whom had ripped what (you had to click to see such information and I felt that this was almost "hiding" it) so I made my own site because well, it was a lot of fun to do (this was back in 2003 when the RetroGameZone title was done in Word-Art, there was midi music playing in the background of every page, and I though it was AWESOME). Me and Locke_gb7 (from before mentioned NES SNES Sprites) where pretty new to the whole ripping thing, we became good friends, and we were like 2 kids on an adventure, it was some awesome times.

I talked to N-finity a fair bit, and was an active member on the forum, becoming a mod, an updater, and finally, along with Wax and the others, came to the decision to "merge" TSGK with TSR after his passing. N-finity was a great man, but no one could make heads or tails of his coding (with several people informing us it simply shouldn't work) and sadly their was no manual to speak of. We simply couldn't get the site going again and we agreed it was what he would have wanted. It was a hard decision to make as being an updater on TSGK was something I really really wanted to do, I idolised N-finity and had always wanted to update along side him, I sadly never got the chance but being made an updater after his passing still meant a huge deal to me.

As for why I didn't submit to TSR? To be honest, I hated the crap out of it. Credit tags, no uniform organisation throughout EVERY sheet. Compared to the TSGK it came across as a rambling mess. Sorting by company also REALLY annoyed me back then (yes I was weird). Of course my opinion has (obviously) changed (though I still have some gripes with quality control, allowing 'overlapping' sprites etc.) and I realised that a uniform organisation throughout the sheets didn't change the quality of the content and that the sheer volume of sprites made such a thing impossible anyway. Credit tags also stopped offending me so much (I have no idea now why they did in the first place).

I started lurking around the TSR forums heavily around the time Dazz was stepping up to the plate. He seemed like a cool guy, young and full of energy (hell he must have been what, 15/16 back then?) while also dealing with his own demons (which he conquered). In all honesty his positive attitude was pretty inspiring, I still saw him as a kid (which well, he was), and I don't idolise him (which I'm sure he's thankful for) but we became friends and I started to be a lot more active on the forum. I began submitting the sprites I was really proud of as kind of adverts for RGZ. I should really submit more but I'd want to re-organise the sheets for TSR's layout than submit them in their current form (which had to be a certain width to display on my own site before I changed the layout) and as I'm still ripping new stuff (aka Darkstalkers at the moment) I find it hard to go back and re-organise old work and still like having "exclusive" sheets as dumb as that might sound.

Yeah I have no idea why I wrote all that but meh, killed some time.