GGX Time Capsule
A day or so ago, one of my friends on Twitter asked me some really tough Time-capsule questions about GGX, since I've been a fan since 1998.
He asked me how much of a presence it had on the FGC, how much Lore was present, and what exactly the fanbase was like way back in 2000-2001, and how much of an Internet presence it had back then.
As I told him, GGX started out in Naomi Arcades, Dreamcast and later PlayStation 2... it was mostly unknown back then (with an invisible player base), having already been eclipsed by games like The King of Fighters 2000, Street Fighter III, Marvel VS Capcom 2, and Tekken Tag in popularity.
It was an obscure unknown title straight out of Japan, and really, only the people who played GG1 even knew about it. So most of what you'd see is skilled Japanese players investing time in it.
The only Lore we had on GG back then was from GameFAQs, an official Japanese GGX webpage that didn't tell us everything, and a Japanese book called the GG Bible that only a guy by the name of Ed Chang at GameFAQs wrote a guide for.
As far as the FGC goes, like I said, it was mostly Japanese players, but the American scene didn't actually get very strong until PS2, and by then GGXX (aka X2) was the topic of discussion.
GameFAQs was both loved and hated, and I hung out at places like ComboGods forums which later became GameCombos forums. This community eventually splintered in to places like Roman Cancel Forums, SRK Forums, Holy Zen Forums... and much much later became the Dustloop and GG Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Discord communities.
There's still a GG GameFAQs community, but if you were to compare them from now to back then... people were way more hungry for information back then. There was still toxicity and dark behavior in the FGC even back then, but nowadays it's easier to make friends than it was back then.
I didn't get involved with GG's lore directly until sometime after Ed Chang quit after GG2 came out... but I was still hungry for lore info even way back then.
The high point of GG's popularity was these games:
GGXX#R, Accent Core Plus (PlusR not so much), and right now with GGXrdRev2.
Well anyway, I hope that's some insight in to how the game was back then!