The Ghost of Piptol Productions Past, Present & Future

The Ghost of Piptol Past

 

It all started way back some time in 1998, January I think. Some crappy Kingdoms 2 Homepage page by some guy who'd just moved to QBasic. Needless to say, he got tired of having a page that dealt with one game that would probably never see the light of day anyway.

It was about March 2000 when the Kingdoms 2 Homepage got split rather messily and was forced to share it's main page with a cheeky young upstart called Piptol Productions. Anyone who went to the site had to choose whether to go left into this new site, or right into the old Kingdoms 2 page at the main screen.

 

 

 

 Piptol Productions itself was only actually a single page, listing a couple of projects. A screenshot of some racing game that would probably never be released, and a game called Labyrinth 2 being worked on with the Eversoft team. It was supposed to be a reworking of an ASCII game called Labyrinth. They thought it would be a nice easy game to start off with, and Piptol had flatly refused to do an RPG. Progress was slow as out of the 'team', only 2 people were actually doing anything. Inevitably, everybody got fed up and the group disbanded. 

 

As maintaining two QB related sites became tiresome, Piptol Productions needed to expand generate more interest in this racing game. Towards the end of 2000, Kingdoms 2 Homepage was finally ditched and all the content moved under the umbrella of a new site; Piptol Productions was finally old enough to stand on it's own 2 feet!

The format remained unchanged until 21-Apr-2001, when the news page was redesigned to allow for easier and more frequent updates. This is the same site you see today, although the header logo has been through a number of changes. See if you remember any of these below. The third one was never used, but was an early version of the current logo.

 

 


 

The Ghost of Piptol Present

Today Piptol Productions is a well-visited site, and I'm very happy to say, featured in many best links and affiliates sections on other sites :) 

Along with my own projects, I also keep the best QB programming tools in the Files section (although admittedly, it's not always up to date) and the active Forum keeps people coming back to see what's new. I also try to update at least once a month but, hey ho, sometimes real life does get in the way.

 

 

 

The Ghost of Piptol Future

 

So what does the future hold for this site? Well, this will probably be the last ever update at Piptol Productions... *Gasp!*

But don't worry, because work on a completely new site is already under way! Instead of being straight QB though, it will also cover my increasing interest in C++, and I hope to keep the same great 'community' feel about it, which seems to be missing from many C++ sites I've visited. But make no mistake, the new site will continue to serve the QB world just as this one has.

I don't think I will be doing any more 'big' games in QB though, and it's rather ironic that I've also decided to ditch the QB version of Kingdoms 2. I know a lot of people were looking forward to it.. sorry :(

But if you enjoy playing my games for their own sake rather than for the fact they were done in QB, then watch this space.. because *very* special things are afoot... ;)

-Piptol