Hello world.

This isn't anything close to an exhaustive, or even a proper history write-up. It's simply the history of some notable feds, people and events associated with the history of eWrestling, in a long, long time from now.

I'm an retired eWrestler, with all links to the game all snapped as you can see from my poor grammar. I was associated with eWrestling a long, long time back... nearly 10 years and my associated lasted around 5 years. That was a time when you had those annoying dialups, where you had to balance bandwidth with graphics so that your website wouldn't take 5 minutes to load and web hosting was expensive back then.

My route to eWrestling was the usual. An ardent WWF fan - and an admirer of a brilliant new technology called Google that had arrived, I'd key in keywords having WWF with it and then check out the sites. As so it happened, I chanced upon an efed (short for electronic federation). the federation was simply named WWF efed, you picked an WWF characters and wrote roleplays on a simple threaded newsboard (you can get a feel of those kind of boards if you check out imdb's discussion boards). The efed owner would decide who wrote the best roleplay and he would be awarded the match.

Gradually, I created my own federation called WWE (World Wrestling Efed)... way before WWF was renamed to WWE, the E standing for Entertainment here notwithstanding. It benefited out of an exodus from the previous efed, and was broken by an exodus to another efed, but not before it had a successful 10 odd shows.

Then there was a maturation to a yahoogroup based efed called WWA. Like the best things, it was one of the most illustrious e-federations, having one show a week instead of four - but was still based on roleplays but with angles thrown in. What was the best about it is that until it died out, it constantly produced shows for three complete years. Anyway, I left it sometime in between and joined an efederation in the real world of angle-based efederations...

The world of angle-based feds was totally different from the rp-based ones. It was flashy, you had to stand out, you had to be cool.

Jon Nasman original owner of ewnweb.net - this was there from day 1; and it still is, although I doubt it's ran by Nasman now. The height of its popularity could never be rivalled to ewplanet because Nasman never really gave a fuck.

Gavin Bannerman one and only owner of steelramp.com. arch-rival of nasman, but his real hatred was jimmy gill, the notorious cyberhacker and soon to be later aide of the author.

Kenneth "Kenny" Heckhert took over ewplanet.com from Fender Barlow, turned it into arguably the most active and most successful efederations.

Fender Barlow always had interesting concepts. I remember EWZine. It would cover efeds etc magazine style, and have like 'e-wrestler' of the month. Naturally, egos would be bruised. It was a good idea but Fender was an inventor, he created things. He couldn't maintain them.

Steve Heady ran Wrestlecell. Prior to ewplanet, Wrestlecell and Steelramp were the forums to post at. There was cool content there like tutorials etc and they would plug the better feds.

Travis Beaven ran fWo. The best fucking efed there ever was. Hands down. It had like poser images (3d rendered images of your e-wrestlers), great design, interesting range of characters and gripping storylines - a damn shame I never really followed it. But it was definitely worth the hype.

The above names, these guys were the people you aspired to be. They were in a position where you had to suck their balls so they could make you somebody.

Especially Travis - but he was a really low profile guy. I mean, like EVERYBODY wanted to be in fWo.

And then, you have your wanna-bes...

Johnny Trip - he fucking had his site hacked and a splash of somebody spreading his anus on it. That's his only claim to fame though!
John Carroll - Apparently, he had his butler to help him type on AIM back then. His repeated attemtps to make his fed IOW big was really irritating with all the fucking whoring and plugging and offering to pay people for their services (site, poser, hell maybe even for them to just join).
John Cusimano - PIW was actually pretty decent but he was a complete arsehole though. I personally think he had an attitude problem; he thought he was superior to people because he was like running PIW. Damn.
Roland - "Yeah I can benchpress xxx lbs and so kick your ass in real life!" Get the fuck outta here, dork.
Aidan Campbell - The Great Pretender. Everything he did, flopped spectularly. He apparently paid 500$ for steelramp.com in the end and it went bellys-up. Gavin without doubt, retired happily to the arcades.

There's always the good ones, but not the best. But they're always remembered and definitely deserved to be mentioned:

asylum brought e-fighting into e-wrestling. More details on fight styles like MMA, and less fake shit like vertical suplexes and Stone Cold Stunners. They were more controversial than fWo and the only reason why fWo edges it was because it was around longer. Personally, I preferred asylum. Pete Borst, Villam Ender, Exxa Decimal, Azrael Ravenell... the list goes on. there was this guy there called t0m who was a prick but the stories he made with his characters, Villam Ender (who was castrated) and Exxa Decimal were amazing. Oh btw, asylum's still alive [link]

Kamlesh was a fucking fedwhore. He was in nearly every fed and he would give them 100%. Every fed loved him.

PIW was owned by wanna-be Cusimano but it was a pretty solid fed to follow. Consistent and entertaining. Pretty poser pictures too.

bm the fed. Ok, self plug, so what?

But you know what? Take a look at asylum - it's going down the same path bm did ages ago. Except we came up with better stuff. People try to be too deep, too sophisciated. The shit's just too wordy.

Linus's theory on why eWrestling died

Gone were the days where you could just wait for the results and see who won. You knew before hand. You were preparing material for an audience. For them to read.

Unfortunately, it began to take its toll on the writers. Why were they always doing so much for people who would just skim through them? Why were other writers getting the credit for their stuff and not them?

The very same forums that built these idols had destroyed the hobby by crushing them. They were underappreciated and they lost interest.

eWrestling was no longer fun - it was dead.

At least angle-based e-wrestling is. The non-flashy non-poser simple RP-style e-feds are still around but let's get real, wrestling is now no longer as interesting as it was 10 years ago. Back then, there were actually wrestlers that made you WANT TO watch.

The Rock

Stone Cold Steve Austin

D-Generation X

Chris Jericho (ok, maybe I'm being a little bias here.) [Yeah, Jericho sucked - Author]

Right now, what do we have? Shawn Michaels and Undertaker are still around which is really... gay. John Cena and Batista main-eventing (no offence, but they're not fit to lace The Rock's left boot together)

Wrestling right now is just relying on sex to sell. It's image has taken a beating with the recent incidents involving Chris Benoit, a highly popular wrestler.

He apparently killed his wife, choked his 7 year old son to death before hanging himself.

Wrestling lacks the appeal right now, which is e-Wrestling's popularity has waned to a point nobody would have predicted way back in 2002. Right now among the e-wrestling world, among their limited masses... they need a new light.

They need their Fender Barlows, their Travis Beavens.

It just needs a fucking spark.

The author's theory of why eWrestling died

Faithless killed eWrestling.

Yeah right you lamer. You just had somehow get your massive ego into the picture and blame your original blog on the death of eWrestling. I'm sure Chuck Norris is responsible for the dinosaurs going extinct.

Shut the fuck up, birdbrain.

Now lemme explain.

Why did people join angle-based e-feds? Results were predetermined, feuding characters handlers brainstormed the feuds their characters would carry out and there where no visible gains. You couldn't claim your character was undefeated, five-times world champion because even if he was, it was not on merit. People joined angle-based efeds for one thing, the WRITING.

Angle-based eWrestling was an outlet for creative writers. Or in most cases, eWrestling, originally started as a fantasy game for mad-ass Wrestling fans got people interested in creative writing. They created their own characters, own stories many of which were deep, emotional, moving. Some of the stuff was so good that it had a good chance of being published. John Carroll once came to me with an idea - he wanted to set up a portal where writers could publish their stories on any subject. He offered me a fair wad of cash, but later shelved the idea when he discovered that stuff that has already been published, whatever the medium may be is never considered for publishing in publishing houses.

Quite simply, you got the idea. Now, blogging back then was a relatively new concept. Only one or two e-wrestlers probably had blogs, but they weren't well known. Faithless was the first well-known blog among the eWrestling circles. It was hosted on slike.com, an eWrestling portal that hosted efeds. I had this little stats thing that would tell you how many visitors and it was showing 100 unique visitors every day, which was pretty impressive. Quite simply, Faithless was a smashing hit and more importantly, Faithless demonstrated to the eWrestling world a much better outlet for their creativity.

It wasn't sudden, eWrestling was still going strong even when Faithless was around 2-3 years old. But gradually, efederations weren't popping up throughout the place. People were leaving eWrestling, slike.com converted into a blog and refused to host anymore efeds. steelramp.com expired into obscurity, ewplanet.com did not host any efeds and nor did ewnweb.net.

Faithless didn't actually kill eWrestling. If it was not Faithless, some other blog would have come around and the blog exodus would have still happened. Blogging killed eWrestling, basically.