 | For the skill book, see Duck and Cover!. |
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Duck and Cover is a large Fallout fansite, established on 13 January 1998 by Paul "Jay" Gallo. It has a rock and roll history of bad hosts, mass spam, quitting management and other stuff and is the second oldest existing Fallout fansite, after No Mutants Allowed.
Background[]
Origins[]
Initially, Duck and Cover was hosted on Jay's own web space at the address http://www.turngray.com/fallout. The site started with a small amount of news and information about the original Fallout and anticipated sequel. In late 1998, a sub-site of the Gamestats Network named IPlayGames offered to host DAC. The site could not be hosted under the Gamestats Network itself due to a rule disallowing two fansites of the same game (No Mutants Allowed was a Gamestats affiliate at the time). During its time on the IPlayGames network, DAC greatly increased in size and added many community-based elements. A large library of Fallout Fan Fiction was established, as well as an active forum. Roshambo, later a NMA admin, was an admin at DAC at that time. The site changed domains multiple times, finally settling at http://www.fallout2.net. In 2000, Kreegle joined the staff.
GameSpy days[]
Throughout this period, the site was very much in the shadow of NMA, but got noticed by Silverdawn, the head of the RPG department at Gamespy, who offered them hosting. They accepted, and got Smackrazor to design the new site layout. Starting with January 2001, the new address of the site was www.rpgplanet.com/fallout, now taken by one of the sites previously hosted by DAC. At the time that DAC became an Gamespy/RPGPlanet affiliate, Jay began college and passed ownership of the site to Kreegle.
Later on, Dan Wood and Killzig joined the site, and DAC was thriving. For some time, after Miroslav left, it had much more news, content and forum activity than NMA. Those were also the times when Fallout Tactics was still being developed and there was much optimism in the community. After some time, after Fallout Tactics turned out not to be what everyone wanted it to be, activity in the Fallout community diminished, as there were no new Fallout games in development.
Fallout Fantasy and independence[]
In 2003, Killzig posted rumors about a console game codenamed Fallout Fantasy which he got from his secret source, and bitched at Interplay about it (you can read more on this here on DAC). The rumors spoke of Fallout Fantasy and a console Fallout game, and Killzig posted about them as one game, although later on it turned out that Fallout Fantasy was in fact Lionheart and the console game was Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. The higher powers at GameSpy put their foot down and kicked Killzig from the network. Kreegle and the rest of the staff responded by moving the site off RPGPlanet and going independent.
The site was moved to www.duckandcover.net, and most of the forum regulars followed over. Since then, however, not restricted by GameSpy, Saint Proverbius and Killzig wrote as they saw it, with more bitterness and sarcasm against Interplay. Since 2002, Saint Proverbius focused more and more on RPG Codex. Kreegle started to post less and less at Duck and Cover, eventually officially retiring from the site in 2003. Dan Wood enlisted in the US Navy Submarine Force and had very little access or time to work with the Fallout community. Since then, Killzig was effectively in charge of the website.
Closed and back again[]
Killzig grew less and less interested in DAC. Since he did not pay for the duckandcover.net domain, it was cybersquatted, and for a while, DAC was gone. After a while it was temporarily moved to thevats.net, but most of the links were broken and nobody cared enough to fix them. In January 2004 Killzig had an incredibly stupid idea of giving admin powers to Megatron and Spazmo, because he thought the forum was getting boring, and it could use some chaos to liven it up. Eventually, the forums ended up broken and many users received fist.jpg in their e-mail from DAC. Mad at Killzig, Kreegle came back only to close down the site, take Killzig's admin powers, and give the FTP passwords to Odin of NMA, so that he could take all the content he wanted. Saint Proverbius was irritated at Kreegle for not consulting him about that, restored the forums, and deleted Kreegle's admin account.
DAC's Resurgence[]
Eventually, Killzig got married and finally almost entirely disappeared from the community, and the site was given by Saint Proverbius to a new staff, headed by Mr. Teatime and King of Creation. Eventually, the duckandcover.cx domain was acquired, which is where the site is now. In 2005, the site was moved to a new host, JJTek, and The Vault, a Fallout wiki was created by Ausir (who also renamed his originally independent "Sierra Army Depot" Polish fansite to "Duck and Cover PL"), both to replace the Duck and Cover database of information about Fallout games and to serve as a reference of knowledge about the setting for the fans and (hopefully) the developers of future Fallout games. However, it turned out that JJTek does not allow hosting of any copyrighted files, including game patches, so the site moved back to Sorcerers.net.
In 2006, Mr. Teatime decided to step down as head of DAC. King of Creation, DAC's second-in-command since 2004, took his place and is the current head of Duck and Cover.
Since 2007, The Vault wiki is no longer hosted by Duck and Cover, but has moved to Wikia hosting, because DAC's server couldn't take the traffic the wiki was getting anymore.
On 10 April 2009, former DAC admin DarkUnderlord hacked the site in retaliation for some DAC members trying to carry a spam attack on the RPGCodex. The site was restored after a few days.
On 4 November 2009, Duck and Cover expanded out into the world of social networking. DAC established a fan-page[1] on the popular social networking site Facebook as a gateway for its main website. In addition, DAC opened up a twitter account to broadcast news headlines.
People in charge of Duck and Cover[]
- Jay (1998–2000)
- Kreegle (2000–2003)
- Killzig (2003–2004)
- JimmyJay86 (the summer of '04)
- Mr. Teatime (2004–2006)
- King of Creation (2006–present)