It’s been a very long road to get to where we are today. AtomicGamer’s origins can be traced back to 1997, when I was in high school.
I fell in love with Quake. My brother, who happened to work at an ISP, wanted to keep me out of his hair. My brother convinced me to start a Quake site. After tossing around a few domain names (back then, you could actually get .coms with some reliability), we settled on TeleFragged.
As it grew, we started another site called 3D Downloads that focused on providing gaming file downloads for free. It was a relative success and grew along with TeleFragged.
As the Quake series dwindled in popularity, the name TeleFragged was rising in obscurity. After much deliberation, we combined 3D Downloads and TeleFragged into AtomicGamer. In our 12 years, we’ve never achieved mainstream success, we keep on trucking.
At the very least, we’ve definitely churned out a lot of code and iterations.
All dates are approximate and generated in part by the Internet Archive. TeleFragged went through some minor revisions during the years, but who’s keeping track really?