ClanBase

Online gamer's leagues, ladders and cups organiser

In 1998, one of my main pasttimes was playing computer games online competively.
Gamer's would organise themselves into teams, or "clans", who would then arrage matches, or "scrims" against one-anther both for fun, and for "bragging rights".
Whilst there were community websites where clans could contact each other and arrange matches, they were usually game-specific and made no accomodation for different countries, making it quite hard to find and organise matches with lots of different clans.

A fellow gamer and myself discussed this problem and brainstormed the idea of creating an organisation that could manage and organise the online gaming community similar to the way the Premier League manages and organises football within the UK; seperate leagues and divisions and various knockout-style cups.
Over the next few months, we outlined exactly what we wanted to achieve:

• A three "league" structure for each game we'd support, with both EU and US regions, and promotions and demotions occuring at the end of every year
• A knockout cup for each region, that every clan could enter regardless of which "leauge" they were in
• A clan management suite, where clan leaders can "sign" players to their clan, as well as challenge and accept matches with other clans within the same league

We started work in early 1998 and had the site online, supporting three major gaming titles (Quake 2, Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 & Starseige: Tribes), by the end of the same year.
Initially, we struggled to convince clans to adopt our site as their new home for organising their matches, but thanks to a sponsorship deal with the newly formed GameSpy Industries (later GameSpy), we were able to offer a $10,000 prize for the winner of the first "ClanBase Cup", which boosted our clan memberships dramatically.
By the end of 1999, we had over 15,000 players and 630 clans registered and participating within our leagues.

In 2000, we were approached by GGL International, who were looking to purchase the rights to Clanbase. After long negotaitions, the deal eventually broke down, and I decided to sell my stake in the project to my business partner and concentrate more on my professional career.

In 2002, GGL International eventually purchased the rights to Clanbase and ran it successfully until early 2007 when they ran into financial difficulties. After being threatened with legal action over unpaid competition prizes, GGL was eventually bought out by Prism Media in 2010.

During the twelve years it has been active, the ClanBase website has used the same design and code we initially developed in 1998 for the majority of the site.