ParkCrafters 1 Year Anniversary - A Retrospective

[wolfpaw]

Happy One Year Anniversary!

Hey everyone,

No major announcement or community update here but I wanted to take the time to announce and give a quick retrospective on ParkCrafters! If you haven't noticed by now, today is our one year anniversary - on this day last year, ParkCrafters opened its doors to the public, marking a new (and much needed) home for all things virtual theme parks and simulations.

One year ago today I took a chance on creating a new website and forum for a niche community that I thought was long gone. With the announcement of ShyGuysWorld closing, I felt that there needed to be a place that many of us could still call home. A place to continue creating parks, attractions, landscapes, pyro shows, custom models, coasters, and more and to still share it with everyone else. A place to archive all the many years of history in this community, a place to continue to host downloads so many can still look back at the many decades of history and continue to create new projects. Creating ParkCrafters was very much a risk and I fully expected the community and forum to not be active at all and for this site to mainly just be an archive.

It's heartening to see that after just one year we have achieved so much and I have been proven completely wrong. New projects are springing up left and right - projects from games and art forms that I had thought to be long dead due to the rise of social media and the decline of forums. From RCT 1 & 2 projects to pyro shows, to dark rides in Planet Coaster - I thought many of these communities were lost to the ages. However, in the past 12 months, we have managed to do and achieve so much.

In just one year, ParkCrafters has seen:

• 68 Status Updates
• 296 Topics
• 3,613 Posts
• 3,397 Files Uploaded
• 75 File Comments
• 58 File Reviews
• 88 Personal Messages sent between members
• 2,627 Reactions
• 45,530 File Downloads
• 861 Total Members
• 166,924 Achievement Points Earned
• 6,837,758 Visits
• Migrations of ALL Custom Scenery Files from ShyGuysWorld to ParkCrafters
• First Competition Being Held
• First Award Show Being Held
• And much more!

Obviously, the risk has paid off! ParkCrafters has become a resounding success with many more features, events, competitions, and more planned on the way!

At this time I'd like to take a moment to thank each and every one of you who has made ParkCrafters what it is today. To all the members who continue to share their work and engage in other members' projects, to all of the ParkCrafters staff for helping run this community, to all the volunteers who helped migrate the CSDepot over to ParkCrafters, and to all who even just visit this community or just visit to download files. Every one of you has helped make ParkCrafters a success today and I can't thank you all enough!

As we look to the future, ParkCrafters will continue to carry forward the spirit and creativity that this community thrives on so much. We will continue to release new features and events to help unify this small but mighty community and of course, continue to host everything as long as we can.

Happy anniversary, everyone and ParkCrafters! Let's continue to make this community an interactive and shining example of creativity that you all continue to bring every day! Here's to another year of ParkCrafters - what will the future hold for next year!?

The celebration doesn't end here though! Don't forget that tonight is the first ever ParkCrafters Awards at 9 PM EST on our Discord server! Be sure to join us to celebrate all the great projects and creativity from this past year on ParkCrafters and to see who wins the ParkCrafters Awards and the Canvas Clash competition! If you're looking for more info on all of this, be sure to read this thread.

Thanks again all and keep on sharing your projects and creativity! See you all tonight at the awards!

- wolfpaw

[Anon-P]

Here's for another awesome year. Cheers!

[Wabigbear]

Congratulations and sincere thanks...no one else was brave (?) enough to set up another forum where I could continue to post after shyguy's closed... 

Others may well blame you for that but I appreciate it myself!

[citytrader]

Hard to believe I've been a minor part of this community for over 25 years, about 20% of my life, and am very grateful to have always had a place to hang my hat.

Thank you to ParkCrafter's staff and members for giving us all a place to feel welcome and to share our love of all these games!

[Cody]

Congrats to everyone for making this community a very active and growing community. @wolfpaw you quickly made it with the closure of SGW and I along with everyone here would like to say thank you for your efforts that have turned into something awesome!

Keep the thrills coming everyone!

[jaronimo.mov]

CONGRATS TO PARKCRAFTERS!!! I am so mad at myself for missing the first competition and awards show!! School had oddly picked up and before I knew it, JUNE CAME! hahaha. I am so grateful to be apart of such a buzzing, booming community!!