GateWorld Celebrates Eighth Birthday!

Stargate news and entertainment site GateWorld.net celebrates its eighth birthday today! The site was inaugurated in a small Chicago apartment on October 22, 1999, immediately following the Showtime broadcast of “Jolinar’s Memories.”

We’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who has made this site a regular stop along your bookmark path. We have made it through eight successful years because of you.

This past year has certainly brought new challenges behind the scenes. Site owner and managing editor Darren Sumner is now into his second year in his (second) graduate school program, and is expecting his second child in January. Co-editor David Read has left home in Illinois for his new job at Stargate Worlds in Arizona.

This year GateWorld has also added a new member to the team: assistant editor Chad Colvin, who has already written some news stories and helped with editing and interview transcription. Chad’s first big piece was September’s interview with Jewel Staite (“Dr. Jennifer Keller”), and we expect big things from him in the year ahead.

The outstanding members of GateWorld Forum continue to make that one of the best (and biggest!) places to talk about Stargate and other sci-fi shows on the Web. As we celebrate this birthday, the forum is rapidly zeroing-in on the 30,000 member mark.

Stargate SG-1 ended its amazing, decade-long run on television this year, and Atlantis has kicked off its first year as the only Stargate series on TV. We are loving Season Four so far, and anxiously awaiting news of the show’s fate. Who knows whether, on GateWorld’s next birthday, we will be talking about Season Five of Stargate Atlantis, the premiere of Stargate Universe (story), more SG-1 movies … or all of the above!

This year the site was featured in Entertainment Weekly magazine, visited the show’s Vancouver sets, and received more than 1 million monthly visits. We also launched GateWorldStore.com, where fans can find Stargate SG-1: A Celebration of 10 Years — the show’s official tenth anniversary cast and crew gift you can’t get anywhere else.

GateWorld has big plans for its ninth year, including a thorough update to The Stargate Omnipedia. Casual readers may not realize that, with more than 2,200 original entries, this online encyclopedia of the Stargate universe is a massive Web site unto itself. (It’s even now accessible at its own domain name: StargateOmnipedia.com!)

We are also developing a new section that will radically affect the way you think about the site, and give you new ways of participating. We are pouring lots of time and thought into it now, and hope it will be as big a part of GateWorld as the episode guide, our daily news coverage, or the Omnipedia! We hope you will stick around to find out what it is.

Take a look at our Site History to read more about GateWorld’s story. Thank you again for making us “Your Complete Guide to Stargate” for eight great years.