So after eleven years of furious debate...

[DavidCaruso]

Thanks for Super Mario Legend, Vinny. Really a blast from the past to play through; I was 16 when I made it, and I'm almost 25 now. There are some issues -- the collision is a bit wonky, especially on the bridges, and though there are a couple gems a lot of the dialogue is terrible -- but overall I have to say I'm impressed with 16-year-old me. The Koopa Forest sections show that I had a good handle on level design even back then, and it's a lot more polished than the average fangame at the time.

I remember I spent hours and hours modifying those Super Princess Peach assets, to get them into a usable form. I even ripped stuff myself, with a DS emulator + MS Paint. (The reason you don't fight Bowser is because that idle animation was the only animation I could find for him.) There are MFGG references in there too -- or rather, references to the MFGG of that time. The Toad with shades is a self-insert, obviously, but one of the other Toads says he "skinned [a Goomba] like a cat", which is a reference to some obscure MFGGIRC event I've long forgotten. Maybe Gato would know, since I think this involved him.

As for MFGG3. Ideally I'd want everything relating to my Internet history preserved, but other than that, the reasons you guys wouldn't want to see it again -- the bickering, the drama, the bullying, the conflict -- are part of the reasons that I would. There's a particular time in your life where you can afford to care that much about a Mario fangaming forum, and that was the time, for me. That iteration is pretty much my main memory of this place (the second most important Internet space of my childhood) and definitely the point where this community started mattering to me. And if the community had been more stable, I probably wouldn't have made such good friends with people like Glukom, Dex, or Shroomguy; shared trauma forges bonds, as they say.

I would love to track down Char (wait, Kyori is missing too?). I used to talk to him every day on MSN through the end of MFGG3, and for a bit afterwards too. Last I heard, a couple years back, someone on MFGGIRC (Treeki?) had found out a shocking secret: he was a 9-year-old Indian kid the entire time, pretending to be a 19-year-old British dude (complete with a fake British name, "Reginald Sanders", and a fake girlfriend who he described to me in detail). Definitely one of the weirder revelations of that era.

Was General the other "hacker attacker"? What happened to that guy, anyway? I remember he was obsessed with Raie (who I believe is now a model, as we all expected would happen). I thought he was pretty creepy at the time, but today his entire persona seems almost innocent to me, given what the modern Internet looks like. The misfit 16-year-olds of the past would post on Super Mario fangame forums, but the misfit 16-year-olds of today are incels.

Also, how did we get from post-Split MFGG (which I'm assuming was pretty peaceful), to something with a lot of bickering and drama?

You're saying that the current MFGG has a lot of bickering and drama? I blame the PPP.