This is part of a blog series to document the evolution of this community, year over year.

---

In the Beginning...

In late 2006, Nintendo announced the choice of the Opera browser for its upcoming Wii's Internet Channel, so I did some research and found that Opera had been available as a free download over the past few years (unlike the last time I had looked into it). With the browser, I started experimenting with its support for various features, hoping that the Internet Channel would be equivalent.

The first working demo was called Sky Diver, uploaded to one of my older websites, Breakdance Crew, where the only people who saw it were those who i gave the lnk. The game was little more than a simple clone of the skydiving of PilotWings for the Super NES. (This game would eventually be integrated into the Games section on Wii Opera SDK.)

In October, I decided to undertake the then-ambitious project of making a browser-based MMO RPG, at a time when all other such browser games were either Java applets or static text and images. This led to the choice of an old, abandoned project from the 1990s, called HullBreach. (It was a crude attempt at making a clone of Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity series in QuickBASIC.) An online remake seemed perfect! Thus, on October 22nd, the domain hullbreachonline.com saw its registration.

It was obvious that development would take a while, so much of the remainder of 2006 was spent researching the capabilities of the Internet Channel beta and its support for the HTML5 canvas, which was needed for the graphics. Very little actual development took place until after the holidays.