Celebrating 20 Years of ThaSauce and What the Future Holds

Hi. Hello. Is this thing on? It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’m proud to celebrate 20 years of ThaSauce today. It’s been a long, strange, and unforgettable journey, to be sure. Although the oldest post currently hosted on ThaSauce is a post by Rayza discussing the launch of VGDJ: The [at the time] Official OCR Podcast, which was posted on May 28th, the actual first post ever was posted on May 5th, 2005, announcing Harmony’s replacement of Digital_Coma as a judge on OCR:

The first ever posted on ThaSauce

The Early Years

Before ThaSauce was created, Larry “Liontamer” Oji hosted a college radio show called VG Frequency. He regularly played community arrangements on the show, interviewed guests, and discussed community events and news. While the show was loved throughout the community, unfortunately, college doesn’t last forever, and eventually, VG Frequency ended. That’s when I started to muse on what I could do to fill the hole VGF had left behind.

The site started out hosted on my high school computer in a folder named “IDEAR.” I had zero programming or basic web design experience, but I was determined to make it work. Luckily, fusion2004 came with a slew of solutions and programming experience. Not long after, ThaSauce launched as a PHP-Nuke website hosted on a subdomain owned by community member SleazyC. The name ThaSauce is a play on a nickname given to me by my friends, “The Rama Sauce,” which was a play on my internet handle, Ramaniscence. It would be another 2 months before ThaSauce.net became an officially registered domain.

A screenshot of ThaSauce in early development

ThaSauce’s community grew quickly, and in the following years and months, we launched new sites, including ReMix:ThaSauce and Compo:ThaSauce (now known as Compoverse). Still, for many years, ThaSauce.net remained the focus of the growing network. We hired an editor, added community spotlights, and covered events like MAGFest. Some of my proudest moments were:

• Taking my entire desktop computer and CRT monitor to do our first ThaSauce Panel at MAGFest 5.

I still don’t know how to sit in chairs correctly. Photo courtesy Wesley Cho.

• Becoming a regular contributor throughout the life of VJDJ.
• Sitting in JamSpace in the late hours/early morning at MAGFest 6 while Shnabubula improvised an arrangement for ReMix:ThaSauce live. A track that would be named Terra’s Got Her Groove Back.

Unfortunately, as it often does, life happened. Many of ThaSauce’s staff members gained full-time employment, in no small part due to their experience working on the site, and as time went on, the time spent updating ThaSauce.net dwindled, and most of the community activity shifted toward the One Hour Compos hosted by starla. ThaSauce was also severely affected, as many independent online communities were, by the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, as social algorithms began to monopolize users’ free time.

Still, the video game community has continued to grow. New artists release new music daily thanks to sites like YouTube and Bandcamp. Community events like MAGFest and VGMCon continue to grow year after year as well. Lately, I’ve found myself more engrossed in the community than I have been in a long time. I have also noticed that, even as the community grows, many smaller communities that make up the scene have popped up, leaving the community more fragmented than ever. As a result, it’s easy to miss updates from artists, events, or communities. That’s why I’m happy to announce, in the words of Strong Bad: “Let’s go back to a website.”

Let’s Go Back to a Website

Screw it. Starting today, we’re gettin’ back on the horse. ThaSauce.net is officially going to restart active community coverage. The explosive growth seen by social networks and Discord over the past decade has caused a disastrous monopolization of what used to be free information on the internet. Everything we do is now being monitored and analyzed to feed the algorithms and monetize our time. Gone are the days of independent blogs, community forums for public knowledge and discourse, and RSS feeds for easy, ad-free, chronological updates. I want to use my little slice of the internet to bring a little bit of that back while continuing to do what I love: amplifying the voices of all talented artists who contribute to our community.

So what should you expect? Truthfully, as much as I’d like to jump back into this full swing, I also recognize that there’s a lot of maintenance to be done around here, and I also have a full-time job. For those reasons, I’d like to start slow. First, I have worked to integrate ThaSauce’s WordPress with the ActivityPub protocol. This means you can now begin following ThaSauce from your favorite Fediverse platform, Mastodon, Friendica, or whatever, at the handle @news right now. Next, I have started work on a new, custom ThaSauce design; One that is up to par for modern browsers and devices. It probably won’t be as aggressively red and black as the site has been historically, but it will still be very on brand. Finally, I’d like to make one community wrap-up per month at a minimum. I feel like that is easy enough with as fast as the community goes these days, and it will also give me plenty of time to follow and discover all of the new artists and communities.

After that, who knows? I’ve been throwing around the idea of having widgets that show community members actively streaming on Twitch, I’d like to do a lot more event coverage since I often find myself as VGM shows, both locally in Orlando, as well as around the country, I’d like to start work on bringing back some of our regular community show cases and interviews, and of course we’re going to keep holding One Hour Compos, every Thursday at 9 PM EST on Compoverse. Oh, and there’s also continued development of all the infrastructure that will eventually become the relaunch of many of our other sites. Only time will tell, but for now, I am very proud of the past 20 years and incredibly excited about the future of ThaSauce.