In the beginning (say, 1997), there was Nothing. Nothing aside from, well, pretty much everything. But there was no ugvm. Mortals who wished to converse on the intarnets about the finer points of why the N64 was doomed, or how the Saturn was technically more powerful than the Playstation but was too difficult to program for so we never noticed, or how there was no need to buy any of these 32 and 64 bit consoles when Donkey Kong Country on the SNES was amazing enough, were limited to the mainly US based rec.* Usenet hierarchy, and the few dreadful web forums of the time. Yeah, they could have just read the racially segregated ugv.playstation and whatnot, but where’s the social harmony in that?
But then, there was The Coming. At 8am on March 30th, 1998, this message was posted to the brand spanking new uk.games.video.misc. Complete with a charter that disallowed console flamewars. Pff. Spoilsports!
Since then, the group has grown, shrunk a bit, grown again, given birth to “ugvm”, the free PDF magazine, been involved in the creation of other spin-off groups (like ugv.handheld and ugv.nintendo), and wantonly murdered its own kin (RIP ugv.gameboy). Over the years, many “characters”, injokes, traditions and so on have popped up. This part of the ugvm site is designed to document them all. Eventually.