Forum's existence before Cave Story was released?

Yeah, I shouldn't be snooping around but I was looking at the list of members of this forum last night and I noticed something odd in the oldest members' join dates. They joined on June 15, 2004, over half a year before Cave Story was released (December 22, 2004) by Pixel! What was this forum supposed to be for before the Cave Story Tribute site was founded?

 

Maybe they were just waiting for release? I have no idea.

Edit: I don't know if there was any pre-release or demo, but it could happen

 

The CSTSF as you know it was originally the mirai gamer forums hosted by skyewelse. It featured subforums for a few indie game projects and general gaming discussion years and years before I was ever a member here, and I believe it was originally called gameflaws which is where the gameflaws theme comes from. If anyone could talk about this period in the forum's life it would probably be metaseraphim because she's the only one left that was around for gameflaws, afaik.

Flash forward a few months and Skye adds an info page about cave story or something, and opens a board for it that becomes far more popular than I think he ever anticipated. The site gets a bit of a redesign and becomes Mirai Gamer, the theme of which I still use to this day because it is so smooth and easy on the eyes. Except for the parts that got missed in the porting.
The activity in the cave story sections keeps happening and the other boards on the forum die out, skye stops coming around and as always there's drama abound. In like.. 2011 I think? Andwhyisit officially takes over control of the cavestory.org domain and the forums, and miraigamer forums die a slow, bot-riddled death. Slightly before the transition is when I was made a moderator here.
The forums were also moved from VBulletin to IPBoard, a change that had some ups and downs but ultimately was necessary due to vulnerabilities in the old VBulletin version. And then they've been like this from about then until now I reckon..

 

Before the CSTSF was created:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050306141934/http://www.miraigamer.net/forums/

Before the split:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100921135012/http://www.miraigamer.net/forums/

The tribute site actually moved to cavestory.org well before the forums did. Back in 2008 it was. Before that the URL for the tribute site was http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/ which was preceded by http://www.gameflaws.com/cavestory/ . The old url for the forum on the other hand was http://www.miraigamer.net/forums/ prior to the split.

 

Interesting history our forum has. It's been around for a long time, gone through a lot, seen so much, went through good times and bad, triumphed over all and got so many fans interested in this amazing game and grew such a huge fan community. Cave Story is more than 'just a game' to all of us. May it live on forever! Amen!

 

Unfortunately overhype and years of worship over the great man who made this game has changed a godlike figure into a fourth place chess trophy that rusts in the corner of an abandoned room, shielded from view. Cave Story was and still is a fantastic game to many, but unfortunately it has long since lost its charm.
I might hold a biased view, however, since I was around when only the vanilla copy was available.
/obscure analogies and deep thoughts

 

Somehow, I did have a feeling that you would be the next person to post here.
But Cave Story has still not lost its charm for me, even after three years.

 

Only 2007s kids will remember this.

like/share if you agree.

 

Only people who registered in the last two years wouldn't remember the Miraigamer forums.

 

Interesting history our forum has. It's been around for a long time, gone through a lot, seen so much, went through good times and bad, triumphed over all and got so many fans interested in this amazing game and grew such a huge fan community. Cave Story is more than 'just a game' to all of us. May it live on forever! Amen!

*sniff* that was beautiful

 

Thank you.