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Post by KeyGlyph on Feb 1, 2023 0:06:01 GMT -5
Hey everyone! I've only just begun exploring the pursuit of Petz showing this year despite having played the games since 2001, and I have to know: What was it like participate back then? I'd love to hear any and all details, no matter how mundane you think they are. If you were active in the scene in the late 90s or early 2000s, what did you rely on to find active shows to join (e.g. search engines, webrings, forums, chat rooms)? How did you learn the rules, and did they differ from the standards we have today? Did you have to wait long to find out if you'd placed? How were you notified? What did your friends and family make of all this, if they knew what you were up to or noticed how much time you were investing in the game? And of course, I'd love to hear any special stories from that time. Maybe you had some favorite Petz who ran the circuits, or funny memories about filling up the family PC with bitmap snapshots. Maybe you made some friends online who are still friends today. Did you keep track of your wins in fancy notebooks? Make collages to celebrate your champions? Whatever you'd like to share, we'll enjoy hearing about it! I'm just so curious about it all, because after following Ratqueen 's incredibly thorough posing walkthroughs and realizing how difficult it would have been to nail the perfect frame without PetzA -- or even succeed at simpler tasks like eyeballing what a healthy weight is -- I just keep asking myself, how did anyone even do this back then??
Thanks in advance!
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Post by Ratqueen on Feb 1, 2023 12:57:14 GMT -5
I have lots of very fond memories from that ancient era!! Actually, I made a thread in Pix of My Litters a while back, which answers some of your questions regarding the Petz community and how showing worked back then, along with screenshots from the past that you may find interesting! Feel free to post there, too.
Trip back in time: my very first petz from Dogz 1 & Catz 1!
^ Lots of screenshots and information there!
I'll post more here when I have some time!
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Post by Megan@Xoops ❄️ on Feb 2, 2023 11:47:05 GMT -5
I'm not sure how the standards all came together but there was a pretty established set of rules, standards, and titles when I started showing in 2004 (I was in the community a couple years prior to that but never looked into showing). Although I feel judges weren't as strict or the competition wasn't as fierce back then haha as I have a few not-so-good poses compared to todays competition that still placed second or higher back then. Or maybe we were all just equally bad at posing our petz lol When I started it was mostly website showing and I'm sure I just learned about it on some random site, although I can't say for sure haha and iirc you would just find sites with shows as you were looking through them in a Top 100 list or via the Update Network run by MK&C or by clicking through various sites on people's links pages, and probably from those who advertised their shows on forums. And then you'd have to visit all the petz websites and email your poses in, then you'd wait, watch the sites, and get your results and award graphic once the show was judged. The only sites that I know of that still do this today are Cargo and December. I did show a bit on RKC here in 2004 though too so there were definitely forum shows at the time, although I feel like website shows were much popular early on. There were also a few websites dedicated strictly to showing - I owned one in 2008 actually, called Triumph. I ran only 29 shows before it slowly died off. Website showing was becoming less then though, shows were slower to fill and took longer to judge as a result. I'd like to say things transitioned more to the forums but not 100% as I wasn't showing at the time. I kept track of all my shows in a spreadsheet and I still own all my petz I showed back then. Several I continued showing when I returned to the community 2 years ago and I plan to eventually continue showing the rest of them too at some point. Back then I remember SGCh being the goal, much like it is still, but I remember it feeling much more daunting to achieve then. SGCh is fairly easy to achieve now with all the forums shows constantly running. I show all my petz to UGCh or WCh now before retiring. Here is my very first show award in August 2004!
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