Remembering RetroJunk

I joined RetroJunk in the Fall of 2008. I was 22 years old at the time and stumbled on the site while (I think) looking for a Doug episode. I've been a regular ever since. I currently hold the record for highest rated article on the site and have 3 in the top 10, and have written 24 total. I'm not trying to brag- because believe me, that's not something you brag about- but I just thought you guys should know. I haven't written an article for this site in over 3 years. This will be my last for the site, so I wanted to make it special. Look at it as the sum total of my experience with the world's greatest Nostalgia site.


2003-2005 The Primordial Soup Starts To Bubble




RetroJunk got its start back in 2003 when college roommates Vertex and Birdman decided they wanted to have a place online where they could relive their childhood. The site basically consisted of a chat room and a video archive of TV intros, toy commercials, and PSAs. This was before YouTube mind you. So if you desperately needed to see that McRib commercial from 1989 then RetroJunk was where you'd find it. I'll wager a lot of you found RJ by its infamous watermark placed on videos while browsing YouTube. The first years saw steady growth and the site kept getting new features and most importantly a phpbb message board. A forum is the true heart of any website, and where I will begin.


As I said before, I joined in late '08. By this time the message boards had been around a solid 4 years. That's a lot of posts. I was a member of the site for about 3 months before I even posted. I submitted my first article, which had no pictures and was about 5 paragraphs, but was hooked. The boards were moderately active, and no member had more than four thousand posts, so you could say it was still a young board. There was one member though who was literally wiped from the annals of RetroJunk lore. That member was known as Reaper. He was banned around 2006 but had a whopping ten thousand posts. That's a lot when the average regular had less than one thousand at the time. He founded one of RetroJunk's first cliques, the GERT FRIED OREO CLUB. The reasons are now unclear but his account was swiped and all that is left is a "System" url error when his account is visited. That was about all that happened of note in the early days. Which brings us to around 2007-2009, which is RetroJunk's classical era.




2006-2009 RetroJunk As We All Knew It



By 2007 RJ had settled into its most recognizable layout. With its G.I. Joe font and retro TV ensemble photoshopped together, the site was a welcome oasis for every manchild west of the Tallahassee. Around this time there was a major shift occurring in the demographics of the site. The first generation were true 80s kids who were born in the late 70s and waxed nostalgic about shows like Greatest American Hero, M.A.S.K, Masters Of The Universe and so on. But they were an old breed and with the new decade approaching we saw a younger generation come, the "90s" kids. The forums mainly consisted of absurdly heated debates on what classified as retro, with the general consensus drawing the line at 1999. The site had about 30-50 regular posters. Back then we had forum titles attributed to our post counts that went something like:

0-100 Whipping Boy - Basically you didn't know Alf from ET
100-400 Water boy - You're one of us, but not really
400-800 Devoted RJer - You're a regular and have some clout
800-1200 Elite - You can now backtalk a mod
1200-3000 Retro Pimp - This one still eludes me..
3000-4999 Retro Master - You're undefeated on Scene It
5000+ Retro King Of The Land - You've got no life, but that's ok


In my years on the site, there's only been a handful who achieved over 5,000 posts. Legendary members like Mezase Master, Xe-A-Thoul, Bassman21, TheCrow174, Knuclear200x, EddStarr88, DebrisStorm and a few others I can't recall at the moment. Adventure of Link, Mezase Master and maybe one or two others actually had more than 10,000 posts! My post count got screwed up when I deleted my account (More on that later) but I must have close to 10k posts. The site was such a buzz back then. You could start a thread and expect 5 replies within 10 minutes which is pretty good for such a small forum.


To say we had a motley crew of members would truly be an understatement. By 2008/09 the discussion matter shifted. The infamous "TV Sucks Now" threads had been done to death and the guys trading VHS episodes had been long gone. The site had a lot of members with Autism and Aspergers who were constantly subject to ridicule, mainly because of their fascination with Closing Logos and Fan Fiction. It wasn't uncommon to see threads 8 pages long debating what female animal cartoon was the hottest. It was a strange time but it really lent to the entertainment and novelty of the site.



There was this one group called the Legion Of B*stards. They consisted mostly of the remaining older crowd of the site. The majority of them were crude and did troll a bit. Probably their most vocal member was DebrisStorm. He was ruthless and ran off a lot of the gentler members of the site. He was seen as a hero by many and also as a bully. While I can't say I was fond of him, he did tell people off who needed it at times.


Around 2008 I was also steadily making my name on the site. I wrote a few articles that had moderate success. I would usually score around a 20 which was ok but not great. Usually anything over 30 was considered popular on the site and I had seen nothing go past 40 since I joined at the time. I was fascinated by the All Time Record page which showcased the sites most well received pieces. RetroJunk has had hundreds of writers, a lot just from one or two time contributors. There were a score or so who consistently wrote popular stuff. Writers like StevenSampieri, Riphard, Cosgrove, Hoju Koolander, Spencer, etc. But then there were less than 4 writers who will go down as the best RetroJunk ever saw.


In the beginning the site was small, and the reading audience was limited. But that would all change when a member named Gaijinninja came and blasted through the 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 point barriers with his articles on handheld gaming. He was the first Dynasty of RJ writers who dominated the readership with high scoring articles. He was the only writer to enjoy having the top 2 places on the all time list. His reign would end though, and that was during the NLogan era. Look at the highest rated articles on the site and you will see his name littered across the pages. He would take a subject and cover it so thoroughly there wouldn't be any more articles on the subject afterwards. NLogan held the highest scoring article spot for a long time.


I looked at these writers with awe, as I really wanted that high scoring breakout piece. Until then my best score was like 27 and these guys had stuff in the 50s and 60s and the highest rated "Trip to the store with grandma" was at like 86! But I would get that break with "Nintendo and Me" in November of 2008. I wrote it in one sitting and was afraid people wouldn't understand it. It was published at night and I remember it got to 20 quickly which got me going. I went to bed and woke up the next morning to find it over 40! I was beyond excited as it almost doubled my best piece prior. Over the weeks that followed it reached all the way to number 3 on the all time list at about 74 points. It was sometime around then I started chatting with Gaijinninja who really opened my eyes in terms of formatting and creating a cohesive reading experience. After "Nintendo and Me" I had a string of successes and since then never scored below 40 or so. In March of 2009 I'd take the title of all time high scoring article with "The Day I Went Psycho". It was the first article to break the 100 barrier and now sits at 200. I highly doubt it will ever be usurped, which in a way is actually very sad.


The site itself around this time was very active and definitely the in prime period that I experienced. There'd usually be around 30-40 members on at any given time. The site had a users online section that would show who was online and even more interestingly what they were doing. Benjanime was watching Sailor Moon intros, PirateNinja was in the War Room, etc. There was a live chat room too, but it was very glitchy so Knuclear200x created a Chatango page that became very popular. I would rush home after work every night to find about 8 or so members chatting in real time. We had a blast gossiping, making video responses and just goofing off. For about 5 months I was zeroed in on that chat from 6 pm to almost 10 at night, what a waste of time but it was fun.


RetroJunk was and still is a predominately male site. So any time a female member came along it was fun to watch the awkward collective masses swoon. There were a few notable RJ ladies to grace the site over the years. There was Celeste who was constantly bickering with the Legion of B*stards. We had NickRules, a loudmouth, immature girl who was on her way out as I came in but was still talked about months after. AtticusFinch, who was a young pretty lady with an appetite for attention, was a great member and probably my favorite female member along with Retroxbunny.


A long running complaint about RJ was the bugs. Tons of issues from the site logging you out to broken links. I exploited a lot of these gaps in the code. I figured out how to see threads in the Mod Forum, see articles in progress by other writers and even figured out how to bring back closed accounts. The Close Account feature was introduced in early 2009. With all the things needing fixing on the site, the admin somehow ignored everything else but decided an option to loose members was worth the effort. Many long time users directly credit this event with the eventual downfall of the site. Left and right people were closing accounts, leaving the dreaded "System" tag over their old posts. I feel a lot of members closed their accounts in a moment of weakness out of frustration with the site's technical problems but might otherwise have still been around.


2010-2014 The Fall

2010 came and went. RetroJunk was sputtering on fumes as it always had. Forum traffic and user contributions were down but not too noticeable. However even though the site was on an obvious decline by now, RJ did get its 15 minutes of fame when it was featured on Something Awful. The article featured numerous screenshots of the forums, showcasing the oddball antics of our members and some of our more peculiar subject matter.


2011 saw another slump. By this time a majority of the long time members had either closed their accounts or were run off by DebrisStorm. The mods were scarcely around to enforce the rules so the place got a little out of hand. There were rumors of the long awaited site redesign. Vertex himself confirmed he was busily at work. I'll never forget the day he PMed me with a link to the in progress site. He asked me to take a look at the beta site. At the time I guess I was being too kind because Vertex seemed excited. RJ 2.0 was a khaki colored, minimalistic cookie cutter shell. I told Vertex something but I can't remember now. I should have said so much more. That update finally took place sometime in mid 2012. The members were excited at first but soon realized what they had lost.



Not only did the site loose its iconic blue and white layout, GI Joe font RJ sign. and retro pop culture adornments, it also lost many basic features. Our profiles, which used to house image galleries, friends lists, and profile comments was all gone. Leaving a profile page with basically a name and location, nothing more. You could no longer look through a member's post history as well. The update also left a lot of articles formatting unrecognizable. My own Psycho article looks like a mess now with garbled text and HTML tags visible. The voice of protest was strong in the forums. One amusing advantage was all banned users were now able to access the site. Even then members like Cleverhans only stayed a few short weeks afterwards, likely completely uninterested in the new look.



2012 and 2013 had an even greater demise in site activity. The forums were empty save for a few familiar names and more and more people dropped in who posted a little then faded away. All of the great article writers had gone, and an article hasn't broke 35 in more than 2 years, with the average score somewhere between 8 and 15. Early 2014 the site got a minor tweak, keeping the same layout but with the similar blue and white theme pasted over it. It was an improvement. The vast user forums were also purged from the site and it remains as you see it today.


RetroJunk has seen many changes and is a shadow of its former self. I suppose feeling nostalgic about a nostalgia site is quite fitting. There was so much more I wanted to include but for the sake of keeping your attention span and my own sanity, I will have to end it here. This piece was probably a little too late in the coming. I suspect those reading it won't know who I am and even then the amount of people seeing it will be sparse. I just needed to give closure. This is my last article for the site. I never stopped writing though. You can find my new work at http://www.retro-daze.org/ It's a young site, but the owner is a great guy who listens and is always looking for ways to improve. What does the future hold for RetroJunk? No one knows. It was great while it lasted and I had a lot of fun. Thanks for tuning in, and as always thanks for visiting RetroJunk.Com - Your Memory Machine.