The Story of SMBX

I couldn't find my other post, I think it got deleted.

The month was June, in the year 2009. Some random dude named Andrew Spinks had created a Mario fangame called Super Mario Bros. X and posted it on his new site, SuperMarioBrothers.org. It quickly gained traffic, and some of the first users to join were piejacker, Quill, and Coldwin who you may know. As this site and game gained popularity, Andrew (who will from now on be called "Redigit") released betas and new versions over the coming months. With a larger forum you'd think he would need some moderators, and Kyasarin/Luminous were promoted along with Kuribo somewhere along the line. On April 5th, 2010, Knuckles96 made these forums and they slowly grew. An SMBX IRC channel was formed on freenode, but the staff caught it and made Redigit change the name from #smbx to ##smbx due to freenode's rules. They shortly moved to FOSSnet (bikcmp's network) after that.

By July of 2010, SMBX was at version 1.2.2. Kyasarin, Luminous, and 4matsy were administrators now, with DarkMatt and Vandarx being the moderators. The community had turned into a cauldron of hate. New users weren't treated properly, nobody was given a second chance, Kyasarin and Luminous had become very irrational of administrators, and the only way to not get banned was to follow in their footsteps (this explains the attitudes of DarkMatt, Vandarx, and TrinityFlash). Somewhere around the end of July/beginning of August, Redigit decided to close down the forums. He'd had enough of keeping up with the community and has said himself that without Kyasarin and Luminous he would've closed it down long ago. bikcmp of FOSSnet immediately put up new official forums for two weeks that ended up having the same problems. Luminous said something to the extent of "Leave this place and get back to your so-called 'normal lives'," and then dropped the SMBX IRC chatroom. A few days to about two weeks passed and the only people left in the chat were Vandarx (an op), Spitfire (a common network user), CaptainTrek (a network administrator), and ddashlover (just a normal user). On August 25th, 2010, CaptainTrek decided to form new SMBX forums on his server (TrekWeb.org) and Redigit supported by crowning it as the new official forums. Vandarx and Spitfire were the new administrators. ddashlover changed his name to fallingsnow and became a moderator. He also brought Blaarg in, and he became a moderator as well. Skittlez12 (now known as just Skittlez) was there as a mod too. Around the same time, the SMBX splash page was updated with a new video showing the Ice Flower and linking to the new forums. This confirmed that Redigit was still working on SMBX.

The official SMBX forums were alive again thanks to CaptainTrek, and in October of 2010 Redigit released SMBX 1.3 to the public. This included many new features such as the Ice Flower, quicksand, and a lot more NPCs. It even contained some unused stuff, like the frog suit graphic Knux found a few weeks ago. Despite popular belief, Redigit did actually start working on SMBX version 1.3.1 after 1.3's release. In one of his playthroughs of The Great Empire, he mentioned working on SMBX's multiplayer. Later, though, this was cut short.

The SMBX community was doing fine until December 2010 when CaptainTrek's server failed, causing a deletion of most of the data of the forums. A backup could've been restored but he chose to instead start the forums over again. During this 2-3 week period in which the forums were gone, many users fled to Knuckles96's forums, causing it to grow. The official forums were put back up for a while until January where CaptainTrek wanted to take a break. It was during this time that Redigit officially announced that he halted work on SMBX (we all kinda knew it was over anyway) and that no new forum would earn the title of "official". Some people were still skeptical because he had a record of "quitting" in the past. It was in January of 2011 that Redigit began work on Terraria, back when it was called ProjectWorld.

The SMBX forums were put back up in January and lasted until the beginning of April. CaptainTrek was tired of running the forums and was going to bring them down for good. Redigit came in to the SMBX IRC chatroom and officially announced that SMBX is by his ass for his ass, and the now commonly accepted belief was that SMBX is finished. However, I don't think any of us were expecting what was about to happen.

One Saturday morning, Reborg (a fellow Terraria alpha tester) asked me on the IRC if I had heard what happened. I said that I hadn't and he told me the whole story. Redigit came on later, and then posted the following:

[i]"Last Friday I received a call from Nintendo's lawyers asking me to remove Super Mario Bros. X from the site and delete all SMBX videos from my Youtube account. They also asked me to transfer SuperMarioBrothers.org over to them. I have complied with their first two wishes, but I do not want to lose SuperMarioBrothers.org. It is a good Mario fansite, even without Super Mario Bros. X. They were going to decide on that and get back to me. I was waiting to hear back from them before I made any statement about this, but the rumors needed to be cleared up. I have a lot of respect for Nintendo and never intended to cause any problems for them.

I am going to ask that you guys refrain from posting copies of SMBX on the internet, as it goes against Nintendo's wishes and could make things more complicated for me."[/i]

It was an unfortunate time for SMBX, lots of great content was lost. Some people think that Redigit was trolling (which isn't an illegitimate claim, Red is in fact a troll at times), but here are some fun facts that can prove that otherwise.

[list][*]Redigit actually told us (Terraria testers) at length what happened and how weird it was. First, he did not receive any written communication or email. This was all done by phone. Second, they called him on his cell phone. How they got his cell phone number is beyond me, but he could've put it in privacy policies somewhere on one of his sites. Third, this was done by a (local?) Seattle law firm (Redigit lives in Indiana). However, [url=http://www.millernash.com/]this law firm is legitimate as far as I know and you can take a look at it if you want[/url].
[*]This could have been a prank call but I doubt that because the call he received was from the actual law firm listed above.
[*]Even if Redigit was trolling he wouldnt've removed [i]every single one of his YouTube videos[/i]. He's even said that he wants SMBX still on the internet for people to use.
[*]This was not the "end of SMBX". SMBX had ended months before, but that only means development has stopped. You still have a wonderful engine for making your own Mario levels, use it instead of dwelling on what is past.[/list]

It was at this point that Redigit stopped all affiliation with SMBX. He was done. Terraria was nearing publicity and he had better things to worry about. This was the end of the official road of Super Mario Bros. X, but there's still more to this story.

During one of the TrekWeb blackouts (I think it was the second one, which was longer), fallingsnow ended up making his own SMBX forums. These are the ones mentioned in the current #smbx which has now lost all ops except for Spitfire and fallingsnow. People also started to make their own spinoffs and other level editors/games, like NSMBX, Super Mario Limitless, and SMB:R (in that order).

Super Mario Bros: Revisited (SMB:R) had the most publicity in the months of June-September 2011, so it developed the largest community despite not having much progress beyond what was publicized. This large community continued to grow and is now (post-wise) the second largest SMBX forum.

This is where we stand now, as a community. This is where we are as a fangame, and it looks like this is where we're going to be until SMBX dies out. Activity has slowly started to decrease lately.