Who the heck does their year in reviews in July? Infact, who the heck does their year in review two months after the year was up? Me of course! This is the Crossfire 14 month year in review, which will be a little bit of a blog and review of what has gone on over the past year and hopefully shed a little light on a few things that maybe you didn’t know at the time. Its not 100% timestamp accurate nor does it feature everything that has happened, but its something I’ve wanted to write for a while, I apoligise if you find it boring!

In May last year I purchased Crossfire from its founder, Raza. Raza, the former leader of Kreaturen and now a coder in fnatic is the conceptual father of this place and back in 2003 when he first launched Crossfire, he laid some very important foundations of the mp40 slinging world. I offered to purchase the site from him because it was evident he didn’t have the time that he used to, and the site had reliability issues. Raza jetted off to Australia not long after the purchase (vacation) and in came the one and only taLa to get his hammer and nails out to stabilise the site and then move it to its current home with X3MServers!

At the time when I bought it, other than fixing the stability issues I didnt know exactly what I wanted to do with Crossfire. I cant code and I cant design, it was a project instantly dependant on others (to whom I’m always indebted), so maybe not the smartest idea to begin with. I didn’t go into the project with the plan of doing the things that have happened. It somewhat all came together slowly, I knew that I felt the ET community in particular could take more of a center stage. Crossfire was always a very busy site, with alot of volunteers willing to do a great variety of things to help eachother, so other than knowing that there was "more", I wasn’t really prepared for what was going to happen.

I got back from E3 2006 and realised instantly, xfire.be was not going to be the future brand name of Crossfire. At E3 I thought I’d wander up to a few rich looking people and ask for money (why the hell not?). Ok I wasn’t that naive, infact I didn’t really ask anyone for money, more for advice. After talking to some of the industry leader I felt a clear brand image was needed and xfire was already taken by xfire.com. The only option for a domain was Crossfire, the name is great and applicable but which random domain would it be. I bought up a tonne of domains, mycrossfirenews, crossfiregaming etc etc and by the time I woke up the following day, they all looked rubbish. In the end .nu was chosen more because its short and sweet than anything else, I’ve still not seen a better option so I am one year still somewhat satisfied with it!

After taLa had patched xfire 2 up as much as he could, he started work on version 3. However version 2 was still a very good base from which to work from. Quakecon was announced and in what was one of the stupidest things I could have thought of, I said in the admin channel, why don’t we send a team? Mmm ok lets think about this a little more logically, here is a website that has only just started staying up for more than 2 days and with zero money is going to magically send 5 people to dallas, a trip that costs £500 when you book months in advance, and a stupid amount more when the ET tournament was announced just 3 weeks before.

Somehow though, I decided to ignore common sense and the launch the Crossfire appeal. It was an idea that’s idea was potentially really good and extremely unique within gaming and it worked to an extent. I remember writing the newspost that the appeal had made its first 1,000 euros. The truth was that the appeal never made 1,000 euros through its entire length, some miscalculations based on what was going to still come in and what the balance sheet said was in meant that actually the appeal raised around 800 euros in total. At this point, its safe to say I was shitting myself.

Whilst its better to have tried and failed, than have never tried at all, failure (or more importantly, public failure) is not a concept that I like. At this point I was trying everything known to man, phoning companies with silly proposals, talking to gaming managers who magically didn’t have thousands of pounds lying around for tickets that were ever increasing and it all looked glum. However as is often the case, its not always what you know, but who you know. Whilst filming for PrizeFight TV the producer happened to know some people at ATi and the project had a glimmer of hope.

It got the approval of the marketing manager for the UK and went to ATi's head office in Canada. Once word of the first approval came back, the team selection posts went up and we did what we felt was right. I remember the whine from the posts and the arguments that people had, at the end of the day this was the least of my concerns seeing as I didnt have the money for their tickets yet!

Also I had to leave for the states at this point. We were filming the first pilot show for the Championship Gaming Invitational in San Francisco, so I was somewhat away from the project and absolutely shitting myself that now it was evident that there wasn’t 1,000 euros in the appeal, we'd picked a team that wasn’t overly popular and it could still all fall apart, even though it had been approved by ATi a second time now and was just awaiting a final approval. Believe me that I lost a fair amount of sleep thinking of alternatives, because in my head by this point I had already thought of what could be achieved with the prizemoney (the idea that became cpc) and the sheer volume of embarrassment failure would have caused.

In the first proposal I had sent, it included the six players and their leaving airports. This was forwarded on to ATi's travel department for booking and little did I know at this point that the project had been fully approved and was going ahead. However that first document included Sanctity, who then left the team because with just a week to go, he didn’t have a ticket and he could still go on vacation with his girlfriend. So I sent an updated roster with the best prices I could find, which included gazeta replacing Sanctity. However communications were less than efficient, I remember sitting in my hotel room in San Fransisco reading iRC logs from the day of the players saying they had got their tickets, all at different hours of the day. Darky didn’t get his, the wrong email was submitted on the form but that was resolved quickly. However gazeta never got his...

Some phone calls and emails later I find out that Sancitity has a ticket and gazeta doesn’t! Panic Panic, Gazeta goes to the airport to try and use the ticket but there was to be no luck so ATi booked another ticket. All of the tickets were booked a day before travel meaning that the total cost of the team and the film crews ticket was in the end around $15,000 a truly astronomical fee!

By the time the team actually got to Dallas it felt like years had passed not just three weeks! Was it worth it? The most stressful managing experience I've ever gone through just for a few days, you'd better fucking believe it was! I think only those who went really knew what a bond was built between the team, myself, paul and richard however the documentary trailer really does capture what an experience it was.

You don’t need me to remind you about the quality of the tournament, it was truly amazing. The games were brilliant to watch and behold, we really couldn’t have asked for a better tournament. r3vers grab of the documents of radar in the final I will never forget! But that’s a different story.

On the last night I can remember making trip's to each of the ATM machines in the hotels on this long road in Dallas to withdraw the money for the hotel as my bank had a security limit on my transactions for some reason. At first I didn’t think I could pay the bill when it rejected my card several times, I lost another few years of my life here, those Texans might shoot me!

My flights home got changed so I had to go back to LA and I didn’t get to experience the one full day of socialising I was going to have with the team, which I truly regret but Redeye tells me it was fun! The experience as I said was breathtaking, but suddenly there were some doors open, sure with $10k winnings there was the obvious obligation to do something constructive with the money, but I realised quickly we could do something big and bold rather than one off and flash in the pan.

What was big and bold? You'll have to wait for part 2, although its pretty obvious it was CPC1 & 2!