Work on the DOOM III Portal started on Thursday 23rd of May 2002, by founder Paul Smith, after a sleepless night filled with visions of DOOM III after seeing the 'Legacy' video, nothing could keep it out of his head.  By the end of that day all fundamental decisions on how the site worked (structure wise etc) had been finished off, and it was looking pretty good, with some cheaply done in 5 minute graphic bars and an empty contents bar and a news page, without news just links to some screenshots and movies.

Initial hit rates were enormous for a brand new site some 200 a day sometimes, mainly due to the just released DOOM III E3 movies, the FTP server (hosted on Paul's ADSL line) was flooded and Paul suffered major Quake III Arena withdrawal symptoms (crazy insanity, jumping around the house and street pretending real life was Q3A) as playing online was impossible due to the amount of traffic that had been imposed on his poor little ADSL line.  A week or so later things started to calm down and he managed to get some sweet deathmatches in, work could continue.

A few days later things started to take shape, a news system was brought into place, and content was moved from the news page to where it should be kept!  

Our first staff member was Chez Kendall (long standing internet buddy of Paul), who was pretty much forced into it by Paul, who wanted to make sure the news script was working correctly and for all users after some initial problems with logins.  Nobody recalls Chez actually doing anything though, other then saying "Hi".

Two polls were added a few days later the first 'What do you think of what you've seen of DOOM III?' and shortly following that 'What do you think of our name DOOM III 'Portal' ?'.  The site was slowing beginning to look remotely professional.

Things slowly got added.  On the 18th of August a forum had been shoved up, and by the 19th the domain doom3portal.net had been registered and was being used.

Update: 6th of July 2003, 23 500 odd visitors later, (not sure of the exact number), and a change of name (DOOM 3 Portal) we've had a couple of new staff members so far this year, Ransom (moderator) and Spineless (writer).

Update: Well moving on - 15th of July 2004 - I thought I should give this page some attention.  Nearly a third of a million hits later - this site has gone from strength to strength now one of the largest and most active communities devoted to DOOM 3 on the net.  We've just yesterday had the gold announcement - a brand new site layout was implemented and we are up to our eyes in visitors at the moment.  It seems as if nothing happened the entire last year and suddenly it all erupts now.

Kudos to all the forum regulars (Mush, Ransom, Chapstick, 3D, DM, Skullz) who've been here the years we've waited - you've help make this site the place for all DOOM 3 needs on the net today - finally the waiting is almost over - the site I've poured over 2 years of my life into has come to fruition and it's nearly time to taste the sweetness of Hell.