A rapid-fire timeframe of things relevant to From the Cradle's history, courtesy of Wilco's half-defective imagination:

  • August 1995: Wilco starts MUSHing on the now-defunct Star Trek game TOS TrekMUSE.
  • 2002-ish: TOS TrekMUSE is going downhill. A few folks, known on the game as Dante, Othic, and Wilco, begin discussing a new game to turn their attentions to once TOS inevitably explodes. They don't so much decide to start a new Star Trek: The Original Series-era game so much as fall into it. Also, Wilco completely forgets what this game is called. It's hosted on Othic's home computer. Othic mostly writes a really good space system for it and that's about as far as we get.
  • 2002 - 2004: TOS TrekMUSE continues to go downhill, people continue to talk about what to do about it when it does give up the ghost.
  • 2004: I wish I could remember the exact day because it was a good one. TOS TrekMUSE is down once again and Othic and Wilco are sitting in the TOS TrekMUSE embassy on OGR chatting up a storm. They start talking about how there's no good science fiction games. They keep talking. And talk and talk and talk and come up with more-or-less the theme for Corporate Expanse, two of the species, many of the major thematic tenets, and the sort of stuff people have spent years working out for their game. In a day. I remember being so excited as ideas came forward that I just started typing really, really stream-of-consciousness just to get it all down. I was up until, like, 3:30 in the morning just exploding over this theme. I loved it from day one.
  • The next day, Othic put a server up on his home machine. We started working. Othic started coding another pretty good space system, I started writing more news files.
  • And more news files.
  • And did some building.
  • And more news files.
  • Othic decided that his old space system, which was pretty close to ready, wasn't very good and started writing another one.
  • This is a pretty big damned game we decided to build, isn't it?
  • 2005: Othic was sans-computer for something like six months that summer, and so Corporate Expanse pretty well sat on the back burner. When Othic got back we got it some proper hosting, but everybody was getting busier in RL.
  • For 2005 and 2006, Othic was pretty well unable to contribute because life was pulling at him, and I wasn't able to do much on my own because life was pulling at me. There were brief flurries of activity for a month or so during which we'd get a bunch done, but...
  • In 2007, I started trying to finish Corporate Expanse on my own. Since I can't hardcode, this would include softcoding some sort of space system, not to mention building everything myself. This was a lot of work, and I realised pretty immediately that I'd probably never be able to finish the thing. So my attention went elsewhere. I poked at an original-themed fantasy MUSH idea for a while and got pretty far along, but nobody else was really into it and in hindsight neither was I.
    • Still have the database, though...
  • May 2008: I say "screw it" and start a new MUSH. Basically, if I didn't do something original science-fictiony I was going to go crazy. At the same time, it seems a waste to throw out a theme that I really, really like and have been working on for years. So I decide to do From the Cradle as a prequel to Corporate Expanse: something small-scale that one human being could actually code and build.
  • June 2008: One human being codes and builds it.
  • June 11, 2008: we open for beta, which means that most of the major code is done!