Many, many moons ago, a boy was born in England and grew up with a love for video games. Such was his passion for gaming that, in his spare time, he would spend his hours jumping on turtle heads and finding the pieces of triforce in the land of Hyrule. His name was Darren Driver.

In fact, such was his passion for games that, inevitably, at the turn of the millenium, Darren was introduced to the world of video game parodies on VGDC by his good friend JT. With time, Darren learnt more and more about these animations and eventually decided to get himself a copy of Macromedia Flash 5 and began experimentation. It began with an abysmal brain child known only as Mariovayne: Dig. However, no matter how ugly this creation was, Darren was proud of it and, on the 25th of January 2003, it was displayed on a badly designed and coded Geocities site for the public to see (pictured right). VG Reality was born.

Darren decided he didn't want to go under his mundane, everyday name and elected to go under the alias "A17roolz", based on a previous forum name he used. The site began slow and, although it wasn't busy, he had at least began a small forum where his friends could chill out and discuss things away from the more populated sites. He decided he liked the atmosphere it brang and wanted to cater his site more to his visitors.

After a few more ugly creations, Darren decided that Geocities really wasn't good for traffic and, out of his own money, bought webspace and a domain name. To help the site out even more, he got graphics expert Carl Prewitt to make him a new layout, and even brought in new staff members including his good friend and fellow animator, JT, and forum authority James (AKA Turbo). Things didn't pick up much better though, but little did people know of the gold mine VG Reality was about to discover...

All of Darren's previous creations were ugly brain childs, but with a little help from his friend, he made Plastic Hammer Episode 1 and broke the 3.50 barrier at Newgrounds. He was gobsmacked at how well it had done and, finally, the hit counter began to rise. With this, Darren decided that the layout needed sprucing up and began work on a new layout designed and coded by himself (pictured right).

The layout proved to be a hit with visitors, and once again in was gobsmacked. His site was getting better praise than the one by Carl! By this time, VG Reality became a well known name on flash sites, and to help out new, aspiring animators, a contest was held to find a new animator with alot of potential to join the site's staff. However, with buddy site VG Hideout closing down, an exception was made and Luke (AKA Alpha eX) and Vazz both joined the site.

With all the success the site had endured, the staff all agreed to head back to the site's roots and make the site into a community site, something everyone can take part in. It was at this point, new affiliate Lloyd stepped in and offered to make a brand new layout for VG Reality, and his offer was accepted.

However, during the making of this layout, much turbulance was endured as our host at the time went through major downtime. The staff decided enough was enough and joined P42Hosting (pictured left), who we are still with today. As well as this, because of his support of the site, the staff decided to offer a new spot on the staff to Vince Chavez, better known as Vinstigator, who gladly accepted the invitation.

As cool as Lloyd's layout was to see, members of the community began to complain that his snazzy design came with one fatal flaw... load time. So Darren decided to take charge once more and open photoshop to create an updated layout (pictured right).

Until the current version of the site, Darren was happy that version 6 was hailed as the best design yet, and everything was set in motion. Unfortunatly, unlike the previous layout, this design came with it's own flaw... lack of updates. Unfortunatly, the coding prowess of the site wasn't up to date and Darren quickly tired of manually editing the site to include new material and the site looked like it was slowely dying, but oddly enough, the community had remained strong and spurred the site to stay open and update more. Unfortunatly, at VG Reality, we're only human and we lost interest in opening Dreamweaver everytime we needed to update. So...

With brand new coding knowledge, a license for vBulletin boards and alot of motivation, Darren began his most ambitious project yet. To code the site himself in such a way he would rarely even have to touch it to keep it updated! And you can see the results by merely going to a page and uttering "ooooo".

So there you have it. The entire history of the site in 6 small sections, and all the staff have found their own purposes on the site, so it all came together in the end. Darren is still webmastering and overseeing the site, Vazz is still animating random toons and "motivating" Darren as co-owner, Luke is putting his coding talents to work, Turbo is still keeping an eagle eye over the forums, Vinstigator is our games guru and JT is doing some great art for us. We love a happy ending!