been here for 10 years lol

just listened to some old cavestory tracks and I realised damn... I've been here for over 10 years LOL. kinda weird how this game is so influencial to many people. looking back, it sure inspired me to continue with art and graphic design and whatnot. and now I'm making a living off of it somewhat.

wish I could write a longer post looking back at everything, the old miraigamer forums, the old irc room, the old skype calls, the connection we all had...but for now...fellas, I wanna hear your old stories related to this game and these forums. because we keep going back here.

 

I can still remember beating Ballos for the first time before classes; and the amount of grief HELL gave my keyboard, and that sweet taste of victory afterwards. I can't say there are many games I remember my first time with such clarity years later.
Though if not for the forums and its members, I'm sure Cave Story wouldn't have had such a long lasting impact...

I remember spending hours cooking up many hundreds of crazy theories to fill the holes Pixel left behind; planning mods and prequels ...but never getting around to making them; playing huge community created mods and choosing Cave Story over going to some classes whoops. Well, I guess there was something special there, for this place to continue to exist even today. I mean look at the amount of tools and content to date!

@WoodenRat btw I miss your original artworks. They had a very unique style. x) Am curious to see how it has evolved.

 

This is a great thread... we're such a tight-nit group, and I think that this forum has spawned some really amazing friendships, but I don't think we often look back and think about how that started. I could write a huge essay on the impact Cave Story and the forums have had on my life, but I'll keep it short 'n' simple for now, and maybe one of these days I'll expand upon it further.

It's so weird to say, but playing Cave Story was easily one of the most important things that has happened in my life. I made some really fantastic connections as early as the first couple of months after I joined, and my relationship with the community has grown by such an astounding degree since then. Almost all of my closest friends I met via this forum, and Hell, I've even made some of my best real life friends due to this game. I first opened up OrgMaker and tried to learn how to make good transcriptions back in 2013, but I had no idea that I would get so into it and become one of the most frequent org creators in the community. It opened up my eyes to the technical side of music, and it had such a positive impact in helping me realize how much I love video game music; I listen to it so often and appreciate it beyond words, and creating orgs for so long was a big reason for that. There really isn't a day that goes by that where playing Cave Story back in 2010 hasn't impacted my day-to-day operations.

So, I guess to conclude, this forum and everybody in it means so much to me, and I'm glad that I have been a part of it for so long. I hope the forums never die and I can be a lonely ass virgin nerd into my 30s and 40s still talking about this dumb decades-old indie game with y'all

 

When I first played Cave Story, it was because I didn't want to work on my creative writing homework. It was really the first time I had an immersive experience with a freeware downloadable game. But the part of Cave Story that truly had the biggest impact on my life was the fact that I installed the old deluxe version, complete with Sue's Workshop and ORG Maker v1.

ORG was my first experience with any sort of DAW. Before this, I was composing music, but I would always record it live, either on a piano or our tiny synthesizer keyboard. I basically nosedived into the program without really knowing how it worked, aside from reading the basic text file the program came with. I tried to transcribe one of my compositions into ORG. It sounded absolutely terrible.

Searching for information about ORG led me to these forums. I saw the ORG showcase thread, got excited and decided to share some basic compositions I'd made that I was really proud of at the time. I saw people giving feedback on other peoples' ORGs and really wanted feedback on mine. But every time I posted something, even if I gave feedback to a previously posted ORG, it would always get ignored. It was like I wasn't even there. Rather than fussing over it, I thought that the reason no one responded to my old ORGs was because no one had anything to say about them. I thought: maybe I didn't make something bad or good enough that people cared about the stuff I made.

Around this time, I was also going through older posts in the thread and getting blown away - sometimes even envious of the ORGs that people were making. I was like, I want to make music that makes me feel the same way these people's ORGs make me feel and began to study, pick apart ORGs, maybe even sometimes copy parts and mess around with them to find out what it was that made me resonate with them.

I began working in ORG, trying out different things, some of which worked, many of which didn't. Eventually, I joined a music compo (OHC), gradually transitioning to PxTone and then FL Studio. Somewhere around that time, I switched into music composition as my major in university. I'm three quarters of the way through.

I think ORG was definitely my stepping stone into something that I was so passionate about in my life. I don't know how much more different things would have been had I not used it in the first place, but it truly got me into wanting to compose more often than not. At times, I think ORG was also my main entry point into connecting with other users on these forums. Although I tried - and failed miserably - to interact with a good number of people here - I was super afraid of posting things because...maybe people would eat me alive. I went ahead and posted anyway and it happened sometimes! But at the very least, I could just make more ORGs and move on.

It took quite a while, but I did eventually find friends in this community. And I'm extremely grateful for the people whom I've gotten to know really well and the people whom I don't know as well.

Five years have passed and I still have yet to make a mod.