Hodadian Award - Pride of the World - April, 2000

[Quintillus]

Like some of you, I have glanced at our About Us page, and even chanced upon our Awards page. The latter lists a number of awards CivFanatics has won, most prominently the Hodadian Award Central's Pride of the World Award for April, 2000, and the same award is the only one mentioned on our About Us page.

This was before my time as a member here, and in fact before the earliest extant iteration of the forums existed, although after the launch of the Civilization III Fanatics' Center in February of 2000 (one month before what is listed in the About Us page, based on my research). So I'd never thought a whole lot about it, but tonight I DuckDuckGo'ed it, and found only two references to the award, at CivFanatics and at Apolyton. Was it a lost artifact of the early web era, a well-known award then? Or something more civ specific?

A few modified searches later, and I found the list of Civ2 archives that @Blake00 put together at RealmsBeyond (edit: also at CivFanatics). This includes a link to the Hodadian Awards' homepage, and from there I found the Pride of the World Award. Its description is as follows:

The Pride of the World Award, formerly given by the CivII Invaders Ring (now the Ultimate Civilization Ring), honors the best in Civilization II website design and maintenance. It is given monthly to a site which exemplifies the above characteristics. Previous winners of this award have included the parent sites of Apolyton (the First Greek CivII Site and the Ultimate CivII Site), Gary Longo's Civ World, and Stewart Spink's CivII Site, to name a few. We are now ready to offer it again!

Now, you might think there aren't that many Civ II websites. Well, back around 1999 to 2000, you would be wrong. I counted 417 pages and sites related to Civ2 in Blake00's collection at RealmsBeyond, excluding compilations of those pages/sites. So, yes, being one of the best couple dozen out of several hundred meant something.

The winners of the Pride of the World Award, which was awarded monthly, were:

June 1999	Tour Eiffel CivII Site​
July 1999	Scenario League​
August 1999	CivWeb​
September 1999	Fantastic Worlds​
October 1999	Spanish Civilization Site​
November 1999	CivII Ziggurat​
December 1999	Platehead's Civilization Site​
January 2000	GameLeague​
February 2000	Historic CivII Scenarios​
March 2000	Carl's Scenarios for Civilization II​
April 2000	Civilization Fanatics Center​
May 2000	The Cradle of Civilization​
June 2000	Bill3000's CivII Place​
July 2000	The Mod Asylum​
August 2000	The North Star​
September 2000	The Art of War​

Notably, while this "complete list of winners" does confirm CivFanatics' win, it does not mention Gary Longo's Civ World, Stewart Spink's Civ II Site, or either the First Greek CivII Site or the Ultimate CivII Site. Could they have won prior to the list being compiled in June of 1999? Perhaps, but it may be difficult to show that definitively.

There's also the main announcement page, where I noticed that (at least by the time of archival, perhaps not originally), the e-mails of the Hodadian Awards were all Apolyton-based, and some familiar figures from Apolyton were credited, most notably MarkG, founder of The First Greek Civ II Site, and thus co-founder of Apolyton (along with @DanQ ). Did this mean that CivFanatics effectively received an award from Apolyton? I'm not sure yet, although some co-administration appears to have occurred, there was at least some degree of separation as well.

Next, I found the list of 1999 awards in the general categories (not the Pride of the World Award). Our forum member @JPetroski was a winner, and perhaps others I don't recognize.

Spoiler Scenario Related Awards :

BEST SCENARIO
"Alba de America" - Jesus Balsinde

BEST HISTORICAL SCENARIO
"Mongols" - Harlan Thompson

MOST CHALLENGING SCENARIO
"Lord of the Rings" - Harlan Thompson
"Up the Deadly Boot" - John Petroski

MOST INNOVATIVE SCENARIO
"Age of Piracy" - Shay Yates Roberts

BEST MAP
"Upper Antilles" - Andrew Hoekzema

MOST ACCURATE MAP
"Mercator Earth" - Alexander

MOST INNOVATIVE MAP
"Civ1 WorldMap" - Oscar van Houten
"Ice Age" - Unknown

BEST MODPACK
"Fascism" - Sergeant Stryker

BEST HISTORICAL MODPACK
"Ancient & Medieval Units" - Harlan Thompson

MOST INNOVATIVE MODPACK
"Fascism" - Sergeant Stryker

BEST ORIGINAL SOUND
"Lord of the Rings" - Harlan Thompson

But before you fanatics feel too prideful about that April 2000 award, note the near clean-sweep of website-related awards by Apolyton and Apolyton-adjacent sites:

Spoiler Apolyton Sweep :

BEST WEBSITE
Apolyton Civilization Site

MOST INFORMATIVE SITE
Apolyton Civilization Site

MOST USER-FRIENDLY WEBSITE
Apolyton Civilization Site

MOST INNOVATIVE WEBSITE
Scenario League

BEST WEBRING
Ultimate Civilization Ring

CIV'ER OF THE YEAR
Markos Giannopoulos

BEST SCENARIO DESIGNER
Jesus Balsinde

BEST MAP DESIGNER
Michael Daumen
Oscar van Houten

BEST MODPACK DESIGNER
Harlan Thompson

BEST WEBMASTER
Apolyton Team (Markos & Dan)

While Apolyton was more established at the time, CivFanatics did win the award in April of 2000, and while it wasn't an award that the general public would have recognized, it did have meaning within the Civilization community. The granting of the award resulted in front-page news at CivFanatics on May 26, 2000:

"I" being @Thunderfall back in the day. As best as I can tell at that time (and certainly by the end of 2001), the Hodadian Awards were hosted at their final home of http://hac.apolyton.net/, which is unfortunately no longer online.

Why did CivFanatics win that award at that particular time? It looks like CivFanatics had made a lot of upgrades between February and April of 2000. February 11th, 2000 saw the launching of the Civilization III Fanatics' Center, March 29th saw the hosting be migrated from Xoom to Strategy Gaming Online, and that allowed the hosting of scenarios and units, which arrived by the dozens and thousands in April. April also saw the launching of the then-new forum on April 9th, and while it would only last a few months before the first direct predecessor of today's forum - with surviving posts - was launched, all added up, that was a ton of activity and new features in just a few months.

What I have not yet found is the Hodadian Awards Central's own award post, which would likely contain their reasoning. It appears that the Hodadian Awards formerly had a forum at Apolyton, which appears to have been forum number 17 at one point (a number that today takes you to the Civ IV forums), but I have not found it in the Apolyton Archives. It's also possible that the awards were conducted by e-mail, as e-mails links were featured somewhat prominently on their site.

This post may become one of a series on CivFanatics history, potentially including the history of other awards, most likely focused on the year 2000s and 2001. Additional information, especially from those who directly experienced the events and can comment on them from that knowledge, is appreciated; please reply in the thread!

 

[Blake00]

Great stuff mate! Also nice to see someone using my 'long lost Civ2 websites' cataloging project. However if you don't wanna send people off this site I should point out the Realms Beyond post you link to is just a copy of my CivFanatics's post here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-fanatics-civ2-information-thread.355722/#post-16071407
In fact I forgot I posted a copy of it offsite so that list may not be as up to date as the one here at CivFanatics.

That was a loooooong project that took me a while to finish. While hunting for lost scenarios for my lost Civ2 mods preservation project I realised all these old dead sites I was finding backups of on internet archive should be cataloged and not forgotten. There were a lot of amazing sites back in the 90s as nearly every man and his dog had a Civ2 fan page with lots of crazy animations and cool content (myself included) lol, they often advertised/linked to each other (which is what allowed me to find them all) and some of them had some great scenarios on them. By the time I was finished and had exhausted all possibilities it was pretty crazy just how many hundreds of sites there were, and I'm sure there are even more out there I never found.

Oh and I think I'll put a ghost copy of this in the Civ2 forum area since that was the game these sites were covering and our members will enjoy reminiscing!
.

 

[JPetroski]

Those were the days. I wish I could find my old conversations with Harlan, no doubt on some long-defunct AOL email. I remember when "Alba" came out - it was one of the first scenarios with a huge following before Red Front. Also that Facism modpack was the gold standard for years.

Really wish we could get the folks who were around back then on some sort of podcast or stream some day before we are all gone I think there's a few who don't necessarily still mod Civ2 but still are around who might join up for that.

 

[Kyriakos]

Apolyton was indeed the bigger site at first, and it was the result of two sites being united (Absolute Civilization and The First Greek Civ2 Site). 'Apolyton', after all, is Greek for "Absolute".
The latter of the two was founded by a person living in my city
I was following both CivFanatics and Apolyton, back when I was a university student.

 

[Quintillus]

Great stuff mate! Also nice to see someone using my 'long lost Civ2 websites' cataloging project. However if you don't wanna send people off this site I should point out the Realms Beyond post you link to is just a copy of my CivFanatics's post here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-fanatics-civ2-information-thread.355722/#post-16071407
In fact I forgot I posted a copy of it offsite so that list may not be as up to date as the one here at CivFanatics.

That was a loooooong project that took me a while to finish. While hunting for lost scenarios for my lost Civ2 mods preservation project I realised all these old dead sites I was finding backups of on internet archive should be cataloged and not forgotten. There were a lot of amazing sites back in the 90s as nearly every man and his dog had a Civ2 fan page with lots of crazy animations and cool content (myself included) lol, they often advertised/linked to each other (which is what allowed me to find them all) and some of them had some great scenarios on them. By the time I was finished and had exhausted all possibilities it was pretty crazy just how many hundreds of sites there were, and I'm sure there are even more out there I never found.

Oh and I think I'll put a ghost copy of this in the Civ2 forum area since that was the game these sites were covering and our members will enjoy reminiscing!
.

Huh, the joys of search engines - the offsite one was the one that showed up. I figured there was a decent chance it might be here too, but by the time I finished the post, it was time to get some sleep. Now I've included both links.

I could tell it must have taken quite a long time once I realized how many sites there were. It really was a different time, and for the most part I wasn't yet on the Internet then, and just saw what was left of it by the mid-2000s. There are certainly benefits to having the community in a few places, such as being able to find all the great scenarios cataloged in just a few places, but I think there is a creativity that has been lost from that era as well. So many different approaches - yes, duplication of effort as well - with all those websites.

Those were the days. I wish I could find my old conversations with Harlan, no doubt on some long-defunct AOL email. I remember when "Alba" came out - it was one of the first scenarios with a huge following before Red Front. Also that Facism modpack was the gold standard for years.

Really wish we could get the folks who were around back then on some sort of podcast or stream some day before we are all gone I think there's a few who don't necessarily still mod Civ2 but still are around who might join up for that.

I remember when I realized my AOL e-mail was no longer accessible - which is also why I can't sign in to Apolyton anymore, as I forgot my password there and it was linked to my AOL e-mail.

I had the same thought that this era could be great podcast material. My first thought was PolyCast, but according to its RSS feed, it hasn't been active since September of 2024. I remember when it did a section on Civ3 circa 2018, so while it mostly focused on the new versions, there is some precedent for history-focused episodes. I wonder what happened to it, and if there are any active Civ-focused podcasts?

Apolyton was indeed the bigger site at first, and it was the result of two sites being united (Absolute Civilization and The First Greek Civ2 Site). 'Apolyton', after all, is Greek for "Absolute".
The latter of the two was founded by a person living in my city
I was following both CivFanatics and Apolyton, back when I was a university student.

Huh, for some reason I thought Apolyton meant "Ultimate". But you would know far better than I would - I was just learning Greek from the archaic history of Civilization fansites.

Another interesting thing I've learned from diving into the archives is that Thunderfall was also a university student back in CFC's early days. One of the news announcements was about how there would likely not be updates for a few days as Thunderfall had a lot of homework due that week.

 

[The_J]

thanks Quintillus for this interesting compilation of ancient facts .

It's interesting to see that while anno 2000, not that many people were online, but the community was diverse.
Today, nearly everyone is online, but the specialized communities are shrinking. I wonder this is because everything gets absorbed by Reddit, Discord and Tiktok, or if people are maybe not that interested anymore into creating unique things. (some dumb tiktok videos do not necessarily count)

 

[Quintillus]

My theory is that people like to do what is perceived as cool, and they also like what is easy.

Around Y2K, having a web presence was cool, and you could either build your own page, which wasn't that hard. Many of them were hosted on GeoCities, Tripod, or similar, going through Blake's list of sites, which made the hard part (hosting) easier.

In the 2000s, forums became more advanced, and you could sign up pretty easily and start discussing, and increasingly, sharing images and scenarios directly. By the time I joined, why would I have started my own Civilization site when I could have just as easily joined CivFanatics and been part of a vibrant community?

Nowadays, it's even easier for most people to post on Reddit, Discord, or TikTok, because most people already have an account with one (or more) of those three, and are familiar with the features, even if those features are not as powerful as what specialized communities can offer. So, it's the default first option for most people, and they might join a specialized community if their investment level grows.

------------

I do wonder about that "not that interested anymore in creating unique things" part though. The Internet was very creation-heavy in the '90s, and while there were news sites and weather and sports scores and stock prices, there wasn't the truly limitless volume of content to consume (in all forms) that exists today. Young people nowadays grow up in a world where their first several years of Internet experiences are about consuming content, whereas when I grew up, if you were consuming content on the Internet, it was in order to create something else (like a school report).

But I think Civ II and Civ III also had a pretty low barrier to entry for creating scenarios. You didn't need to be a programmer to start dabbling in modifying scenarios, and didn't need to know 3D modeling to create custom graphics. The skills were within the reach and hobby timeframe commitments of the average person, which lead to a proliferation of scenarios, which encouraged people to think, "if there are this many community-created scenarios, I can probably create something like what I'm envisioning, too" - a positive reinforcement loop.

Add in that everything seemed new and it didn't feel like "everything's already been done" in the early days of the Internet, and maybe it was more a high-water-mark of technical creativity than today is a low-water-mark. At least in terms of the percentage of people involved who were active creators.

 

[Blake00]

I should also mention @Quintillus that I started a Civ3 fan website cataloging list too but didn't get far as I was busy with the Civ2 list and creating a links page on your site that links to all your buddies websites went out of fashion by the time Civ3 had come along so I knew I probably wouldn't get far. I'll have to PM you the preliminary list at some point as you'll probably have some additions to it. Then we can setup a thread and others can submit Civ3 sites they remember that we missed.

Regarding the merger you guys might find it interesting that I managed to find backups of 4 different sites before they merged into Apolyton which was pretty cool.

 

[Quintillus]

I probably got on the Internet too late to have a lot of contributions to that list - I didn't get Internet at home until mid-2006 (although I'd peripherally known of CFC, mainly the Hall of Fame, for some time before that). By then, is was pretty much just CivFanatics and Apolyton. WePlayCiv hadn't been founded yet, and CivJunction wound up being an April Fools' joke. The main other ones I knew were the language-specific ones - civforum.de of course, but I could also probably find the (possibly still extant) Polish and maybe the Chinese civ sites from that era.

There probably were a lot more in the early 2000s, which more tenured forum members would remember better than I would.

 

[Kyriakos]

Huh, for some reason I thought Apolyton meant "Ultimate". But you would know far better than I would - I was just learning Greek from the archaic history of Civilization fansites.

In some limited cases, the two can be synonymous. But this only means that it can be translated as "ultimate" when it is implying that it is the absolute (as the absolute edge of an 'eidos' of idea etc)
For example, the phrase 'Ultima Thule' is a latin translation of the Greek "Έσχατη Θούλη" (the -most- distant Thule), which has no relation to being absolute unless it is taken as a symbol of what is most distant.

 

[The_J]

I do wonder about that "not that interested anymore in creating unique things" part though. The Internet was very creation-heavy in the '90s, and while there were news sites and weather and sports scores and stock prices, there wasn't the truly limitless volume of content to consume (in all forms) that exists today. Young people nowadays grow up in a world where their first several years of Internet experiences are about consuming content, whereas when I grew up, if you were consuming content on the Internet, it was in order to create something else (like a school report).

But I think Civ II and Civ III also had a pretty low barrier to entry for creating scenarios. You didn't need to be a programmer to start dabbling in modifying scenarios, and didn't need to know 3D modeling to create custom graphics. The skills were within the reach and hobby timeframe commitments of the average person, which lead to a proliferation of scenarios, which encouraged people to think, "if there are this many community-created scenarios, I can probably create something like what I'm envisioning, too" - a positive reinforcement loop.

Add in that everything seemed new and it didn't feel like "everything's already been done" in the early days of the Internet, and maybe it was more a high-water-mark of technical creativity than today is a low-water-mark. At least in terms of the percentage of people involved who were active creators.

I think I'm just being old n grump and am lamenting the "good old days" (whatever that may mean).
I think you're certainly right about this. Today everything is nearly professional, and someone just dabbling around with something will not feel like they're making an impact in anything.
Smaller communities might actually be beneficial for this though.
I see it on Mastodon, where regularly just random stuff goes viral, whereas on the deepfake-porn-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter it's all polished professional stuff.
Having the commercial behemoth removed might open up more chances for random people.
But I might just be rambling.

 

[JPetroski]

But I think Civ II and Civ III also had a pretty low barrier to entry for creating scenarios. You didn't need to be a programmer to start dabbling in modifying scenarios, and didn't need to know 3D modeling to create custom graphics. The skills were within the reach and hobby timeframe commitments of the average person, which lead to a proliferation of scenarios, which encouraged people to think, "if there are this many community-created scenarios, I can probably create something like what I'm envisioning, too" - a positive reinforcement loop.

Civ2 especially. I was making scenarios in middle school with only the scarcest understanding of math. And for me, it started by modifying a WW2 scenario someone else had built and putting in various aircraft.

I remember when Civ3 was on the horizon and how excited Harlan Thompson was to get going on a new WW2 scenario. He'd built the map on graph paper in preparation. Then it came out and while it would ultimately prove very modable over the years it certainly didn't feel that way at the beginning, especially with the animated art they went with. It's crazy compared to what came after, but that was really intimidating at the time to many of us. Perhaps there were workarounds I never lasted to see but I know I never made the transition and haven't even played another Civ game besides 2 until 6 (and I haven't bought 7).

Civ2's stuff isn't (for the most part) animated or such but what some of our folks have made in terms of units are purely gorgeous and the thing about it is that *every* aspect of Civ2 is completely novice-friendly for modding. All you need is a basic paint program and notepad and you're good. Now with lua there's been such a revival and I wish more people knew that but so many have moved on and not everyone wants to play a game that old this long I suppose.

 

[Patine]

In some limited cases, the two can be synonymous. But this only means that it can be translated as "ultimate" when it is implying that it is the absolute (as the absolute edge of an 'eidos' of idea etc)
For example, the phrase 'Ultima Thule' is a latin translation of the Greek "Έσχατη Θούλη" (the -most- distant Thule), which has no relation to being absolute unless it is taken as a symbol of what is most distant.

Which is worse for a profusion of sometimes unclear in application contextual near-synonyms - Greek or English?

 

[Kyriakos]

Which is worse for a profusion of sometimes unclear in application contextual near-synonyms - Greek or English?

I fear that I am not in a position to say, as (naturally) I only have an ingrained sense of it in Greek, and merely a calculated one for English...

 

[Quintillus]

Having the commercial behemoth removed might open up more chances for random people.
But I might just be rambling.

I think you're on to something there. How many people want to sing on the radio right after a John Lennon song? Not many; they can't compare with John Lennon! How many want to sing at karaoke? Significantly more, but a lot of people still don't think they have a good enough voice to be up on that stage at the karaoke bar. How many sing in the car with friends? Quite a few who don't sing karaoke! And even more will sing in the shower when they think no one can hear them.

And taking it back to the Civ space, if there weren't any 800-pound gorillas of Civ sites, you could create your own and it could be one of the best ones. Now, the remaining Civ sites have had thousands of people put tens of thousands of hours (or more) into them, and how could one person hope to compete with that? Even if you did come up with something novel, without web rings, how would it get discovered?

 

[Quintillus]

I should also mention @Quintillus that I started a Civ3 fan website cataloging list too but didn't get far as I was busy with the Civ2 list and creating a links page on your site that links to all your buddies websites went out of fashion by the time Civ3 had come along so I knew I probably wouldn't get far. I'll have to PM you the preliminary list at some point as you'll probably have some additions to it. Then we can setup a thread and others can submit Civ3 sites they remember that we missed.

It turns out we have a page for that, although you have discovered far more Civ II sites than are listed. But it does have more Civ III sites than I was aware of.

 

[Patine]

And taking it back to the Civ space, if there weren't any 800-pound gorillas of Civ sites, you could create your own and it could be one of the best ones.

You mean like the Cradle of Civilization, the German Civilization Webring, the Civilization Fascism Site (referring to an alternate government for Civ2 to replace Fundamentalism in the text files, not an echo chamber advocating the ideology in RL), Catfish's Civilization Cave, and Techumseh's Civilization Site (the creator of the last is still active on the Scenario League, and the creator of the second last was up until a few years ago).

 

[Quintillus]

You mean like the Cradle of Civilization, the German Civilization Webring, Catfish's Civilization Cave, and Techumseh's Civilization Site (the creator of the last is still active on the Scenario League, and the creator of the second last was up until a few years ago).

Emphasis on 800-pound. According to Cradle of Civilization in 2003, Apolyton and CivFanatics were already by then in a category of their own:

But I was really thinking of the early days. When Civilization II was new, it was an open frontier for that game, and only established Civ I sites would have provided competition.

The list of site you've mentioned is useful. I'm too young to remember what came before the Apolyton/CFC era (although I have a little bit of familiarity with Tecumseh from perusing the forums here), and many forum members are younger than me. Blake00's listing has 400+ Civ II fan sites/pages, which is a huge list. So the question of, "where do I start?" is a big one, and "what is still remembered?" helps answer that. It's part of what I imagine might come up with the podcast idea that JPetroski mentioned.

 

[Blake00]

I still work on my old website (that's almost 25 years old now) and it's Civ section knowing that next to no one visits anymore but it's more of a fun hobby. Other than the big ones nearly all of those sites in my list are gone and only accessible via the Internet archive wayback machine these days sadly.

 

[JPetroski]

There might have been 400+ fan sites but @Patine (and the Cradle site you linked) covered most of the main ones.

For the most part as I recall it was Apolyton and CFC and the former had a what I perceived to be a bigger base (subjective memory but that’s where everyone hung out seemed). CFC eventually overtook it.

The other sites were mainly author collections. Bernd Brosing also had one I think as did Allard Hoefelt and Mike Jezenka for a time. So did Alex the Magnificent and while I don’t think Harlan did didn’t his friend… Leon Merrick perhaps? Then name escapes me. Oh and who could forget Stuart Spink lol. He had a small site too.

I all seriousness though how hard could it be to screen record a zoom meeting or something similar of all of us some time? I think it would be fascinating to get our collective memories going.