Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Back in the early days of Jazz, the news world was dominated by Jazz2City and Jazz Central. Another popular site, Jazz2Stuff, was also on and all of these sites where fairly popular.

Now near the end of ’98 I got this stupid idea that I could copy Wakeman’s poll idea and have a monthly poll myself, with many more questions and becuase it would be up longer it would have many more answers and basically be larger. The problem was that I knew very little HTML, and I do lots of my work in Netscape Composer (don’t laugh). So, I consulted Wakeman via e-mail, and continually bothered him about the idea and about the main idea of making forms. Becuase of this harassment, he made a tutorial that he eventually posted on J2S called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Making Forms” (or something along those lines).

Now once I attempted to get the project running, I had a new revelation: my idea was stupid. Somehow I then decided that I would just make a fanpage for Jazz2, maybe have some of my person tips on it, some choice levels, etc. Well long story short pretty soon I had an ugly little site full of worthless crap. Information on Jazz2, Tips, Strategy, Cheating, a Poll, etc. The layout was crappy. Later than sooner I decided I wanted to improve the site to a new level, so I then began redesigning the site, mimicking Jazz2City’s new very-blue layout in a sense. I also began to bother Wakeman more – esp. about frames until I figured those out.

When the new version came out, I got a few good responces, enough to motivate me further. Well, needless to say eventually The Rabbit Hole developed into something new and different. I got word out that jobs were open on the site, and thus I got Alienator who designed a downloads section, and eventually began helping me with graphics (in other words he would show me his amazing work and I would kiss his feet and try to learn new things). BoggyB and someone else (I can’t think of their name off the top of my head) began updating the news. I hired Cobra to do everything related to the Poll.

Soon I had what was sometimes considered the 3rd best Jazz 2 site. I would basically post news and strategically get new info from other Jazz 2 site (in other words – reading their content, stealing it, but linking back). Eventually the RH had a lot of original content, including an entire section on it (ahh, hearing TFS being called that is so refreshing), a Stories section, and lot of other crap that I can’t think of.

Anyway, eventually there came the downfall of Jazz2City, and sooner thereafter Jazz Central. For a brief moment in Jazz’s history we were the only Jazz 2 news source (besides the JMMB which was up after J2C’s downfall). Not long later Alienator burst onto the scene with a new Jazz2 site “Universe Jazz”. Ahh, that was a great site. Anyway, somewhere along the line Alienator convinced me to do a merger with him so that all of RH’s content would go to UJ.

Unfortunately, that merger never really happened. Alienator had all that he needed to add for UJ but never really added it, and the Rabbit Hole was killed from its old server and set to aim for UJ. But then without warning Alienator deleted all of UJ and sold the domain. The Rabbit Hole was completely lost.

Okay, not entirely. The old old old news archives can be found at http://jzinx.virtualave.net/RabbitHole/archives (watch out, though, it’s got a ton of banner-ads). The RH was also kind of my own personal journal in some cases so feel free to point and laugh at how stupid I am.

The whole merger thing was never really properly announced, so there was some confusion, and even a brief moment in time where I was planning on re-opening the RH, but, alas, it never happened.

Wow, I wrote a lot.