An Introduction and Brief History

Entry posted by Sardonic February 8, 2010

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Greetings and welcome.

I decided to make this blog to give interested people an insight into GOONS. I am not sure how long I will continue it, but if there is sufficient interest, time permitting, I will keep it going.

What is a Goon, anyway?

Most simply a Goon is a member of the Something Awful Forums.

Less simply there are many, many kinds of Goons out there. Each subforum is practically its own self-contained community, some threads can practically be communities in and of themselves. There are quite literally hundreds of subforums. I claim residence in Games, Laissez's Faire, and a thread in Private Game Servers.

That said, there are many uniting factors which most, if not all goons share, I'll go into that if there is enough interest.

A Brief History of Goons and the CN Family of Browser Games

This is the very abridged version. There is a *lot* to say about what happened in the various spin-offs from the original CNGOONS, but I will limit that for now to the one I was most familiar with: The faction that resided on the moon.

This faction is very special to me, for it was a faction that I served in government in nearly from the founding of the alliance to its death. While the faction started as a spin-off of the original CNGOONS (the charter was ripped almost word for word, in fact), it quickly developed its own unique culture. If I recall, none of the government had ever had positions in CNGOONS. We had to play the diplomatic game constantly, or risk destruction. The exploits of earthbound CNGOONS put a gigantic target on our heads (in many ways more so than we have now, as the wounds were still very fresh then). We evolved diplomatically to adapt, but we still lost many wars, if only because we could not make up the time gap, as we had come on the scene reasonably late. In the end though, we persevered, and wound up dominating the game.

Of course, rather than have a GOONS dominated game on their hands, they decided to start a 'round two' of the game and close registration of the first round. Either way, that world is dead and gone, and it ended on a high note (for us anyway), and more importantly it helped develop our diplomatic skills.

After the lunar escapade was done, we moved on to Galava, which didn't really work out either, for a variety of reasons.

After all these factions died out, for a time there was nothing.

CNGOONS2: Electric Boogaloo

One day, out of the blue I received a message from my friend and sometimes mortal enemy, salithus. (salithus and I have a very long and colorful history, but I'm certainly not going to get into that here). He wanted to get GOONS back in CN. I agreed, I had wanted this for a long time, and had kept my nation up only for the hope of a return. Together (and with the writing help of Lamuella) we made it back. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't surprisingly hard either to get enough support to come back successfully. The lessons we had learned about diplomacy from the moon had served us well. Our government was largely people from the moon GOONS government.

Our real obstacle to returning came internally. The old CNGOONS government (not all of it, but a few rabid ones) chose to oppose us dramatically, declaring we had "undone all the good they did by disbanding", an argument that still makes no sense to me to this day. But we managed to survive their trolling of our recruitment threads, and got many new people interested in Cybernations, as well as a few returning veterans.

And then some other stuff happened, and here we are today, nearly a year later.

Anyway, please make comments suggesting what to cover next. There is a lot of ground to cover. Topics about my involvement with all this, the core differences between us and the original, what exactly happened on the moon, those sorts of things.