Tapping the Keg (Part 1)

7 years - is it that long?

In the winter of 1999 I was putting the finishing touches on an Internet based simulation game that I was calling BeerMogul.

I knew I was about a month from a beta release, so I thought it would be a good idea to set up a registration page - I could get a few mates to pre-register so that it was more fun on day one - nothing worse than being the only player in a multi-player game. I added a little information about the game concept and a couple of development screen shots.

I would check the registration report daily to get an update on progress - over the next week I had about 12 registrations - pretty impressive (or so I thought). Things died down once I ran out of people to tell about the concept (or so I thought).

On one of my regular checks I nearly choked on my Grolsch. 238 registrations!

I couldn't believe it, and jumped straight into the web logs to see where the traffic had come from. It was all coming from one address - the btinternet home page! I jumped on onto the site and found the source. BeerMogul was listed as the site of the day - there was even a writeup raving about the great new game. The trouble was - the game didn't even exist yet.