February 23rd, 2009. I had just turned 12 years old three and a half months earlier. I was in sixth grade. I was a Big Brother fanatic.
Tengaged had been active for less than a year, Lexxu was number 1 in the HoF with less than 1000 karma, and Stars 15 was underway (Emmaleigh won in case you were wondering :p)
I remember googling “Big Brother online game” and stumbling upon this site. I made an account and was pretty much instantly hooked.
From the good ‘ole days to the dark ages, I have experienced tengaged pretty much from the beginning and I really never have felt the need to insert myself in a lot of its drama, so from the mind of someone who has always been a bit of an outsider on the site, here is My Tengaged Experience.
Upon joining my first game, I didn’t make any friends. In fact, the whole game was against me. Yes, in a castings. Castings used to actually be taken pretty seriously and I somehow made quite a few enemies in mine, which resulted in a cute 14th place. I almost left the site, but I joined another and won, which is probably where my addiction really began.
In June of 2009, I told my cousin MoreBeastThanYou to join the website and he did. Throughout the remainder of the year, I saw him instantly start to acquire a bit of tengaged fame and get in good with a lot of the “popular” tengagers back in the day. This all culminated when he was voted into the first ever Big Stars Giveaway in late 2009. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Big Stars Giveaway (BSG) was this thing put on by then game coordinator Jubbzy where people who had never competed in Stars before could enter and the tengaged public would vote on who they want to see in the house. There were 3 or 4 voting rounds and I was eliminated in round 1. Yikes.
Seeing Bryan play Stars made me want it even more. It just seemed hella fun idk why. To this day Stars is still my favorite game to play on this site. However, I did not get the chance to play Stars for the first time until April 24th, 2010. I had been on the site for over a year at this point and felt like I was ready for my first Stars game. I did manage to make it to the final 4 with a lot of noob support since it was my first game and I even survived a poll (something I’ve only been able to do one other time in the past 8 years since then thanks Tengaged!)
2010 also saw the rise of The Duel. The Duel was a fantastic game! It didn’t last on the site for very long, but a lot of people had fun with it. To this day, people who remember it still ask for it back, but we got hunger instead, which is a flop game if you ask me, but The Duel shall live on in anyone’s hearts who ever got the opportunity to play it.
Nearing the end of 2010, a lot had happened on tengaged. Scandals, Tengaged Court DISAPPEARING FOREVER RIP TENGAGED COURT, and some of the top groups of that time going toe to toe.
If you were wondering, the top groups of that era were definitely the Blondetourage and the Late Night Crew. phUN came along around this time as well. Tengaged Radio was at it’s prime, and KingMac was back!
2011 was one of my favorite years on tengaged. I became the king of 12th place in Stars and during the summer of that year, I had really formed my first solid group of friends on the site. Like clockwork, we would be on Skype every night and talk ALL NIGHT LONG. And we had a blast! Most of us were still in high school and a few of us didn’t even have our license yet, so what else were we supposed to do besides stay up all night playing OMGPOP? PaulaDeen, crush, Florina, and a special shout out to ohhayy (who I still keep in touch with every once in a while). You guys were a huge part of my Tengaged story with all of the fun we had that summer. It sucks that it was never the same come the fall, but I was glad that we met when I was 14 and I still keep in touch at least one of you at age 21.
2012 rolls around and I definitely start to notice a difference in tengaged. Moderation is treated very nastily. Some mods are being very abusive with their powers. A lot of people who were big on the site when I joined are dipping out. However, I still stuck around and tengaged did get better later that year, for a while, at least. However, during the summer of 2k12, most of my friends from the previous summer had split and gone with different crowds. I don’t really know how, but I spent most of my nights playing Roblox Hunger Games with Bridgette77 and finklestein123
Ohhayy, MarieTori and I were also KILLING it in Habbo Hotel role plays at the time. Mostly me, but :).
Oh yes, 2011 and 2012 were also big years for gender fakers getting exposed. Nowadays gender faking isn’t as common nor is it as big of a deal as it was 5 or 6 years ago. People went to great lengths to fake being a girl like getting voice changers to use on call and such. However, around this time, a lot of them were coming forth to say they were actually a boy. The female population on tengaged went from a couple hundred to like below 30 and never recovered!
2013 was a weird year for tengaged, but an exciting one for me! On May 4th, 2013, I joined Stars 234 to get my every-so-often Stars fix, not thinking anything of it. It had a pretty intimidating cast. Big names like schmooboy, BBlover96, Kooldude1991, bamold1999, mikec51, Yaxha, and Konohavillage1 all graced the game wit their faces, as well as some new people to the Stars game and then there was me.
I still don’t really know how I did it, but I managed to make it to the finals unnominated and actually won the game! So for those of you who didn’t know, yes I have won a Stars. I know, hard to believe, right?
You would think in a time where Stars wins still “mattered”, my popularity would have flourished. And it did for about 3 days. I never made it a point to put myself out there because who really cares? I was at a point where I felt like winning Stars was the last thing I wanted to do on the site, so I kinda lost interest after that. Enter the Tengaged Apocalypse.
Most of you have probably heard of the Tengaged Apocalypse, but I am a SURVIVOR. Now this “apocalypse” happened actually very shortly before I won Stars. Then mod #BioDork had gone rogue and banned seemingly hundreds of users. I actually think I peaked in the top 100 at that point and I was in the 4 or 5 hundreds? Yeah, a lot of people got banned.
Moderation was brought into question and that’s when it really went to shit. Mod powers were revoked and tengaged didn’t really know what to expect. Hunger Games also premiered on the site in later 2013, so yeah 2013 was a wild year for tengaged.
Now as a lot of you have been on the site since at least 2014, you know pretty much everything that has happened since then, which isn’t much. Tengaged has been very consistent with not providing anything new to the website since hunger games was released. There have been tiny updates, but it’s been nearly five years since we got anything new. Does anyone remember Sponsor Games? Jesus, I nearly forgot about those they were the BIGGEST flop on tengaged.
Anyways, tengaged has also been without a solid group of moderators for 4-5 years now and the site definitely has yet to recover. Whether randomize will ever fix this problem or not has yet to be seen. But I know what this site can be. I’ve seen it in its prime. It can be a place for people to feel welcome, accepted, and a place to make some genuine friendships! I have done pretty much all there is to do on tengaged, but I still stick around to keep up with people that I met 9 years ago and people that I met 2 months ago.
As someone who has always been pretty quiet about their experiences on this site and how they feel about the site in general, this is it. Tengaged to me is…was something special and I feel like anyone that was active years ago could agree. I mean, there’s a reason a handful of us from 08/09 are still active, right? I’ve seen a lot of people come, make a name for themselves, and leave. I’ve seen people thrive on this site and then go missing for a few days or weeks only to find out they died in real life.
Sure some of you will say this is just the internet. But behind the Gemma Weaves are real people, let us not forget that. Stay real tengaged, and here’s to however long I remain on this damned website.
Real talk, out!
P.S. If anyone has any questions, thoughts, or want my opinion on pretty much anything that has happened on the site, feel free to comment it and I’ll try my best to answer. I’m sure there’s a lot I left out, but I can’t remember every little facet of the past 9 years!
Comments
tldr but it's so nice to see so many familiar usernames in this lol.
love this blog i read the whole thing lmao
i joined in 08 so i can really relate to a lot of this, i miss the old tg :(
i remember when i was 16 and id literally stay up all night on calls with my tg friends and wed have sooo much fun
miss those days ugh :(
Excellent work. The quality of the research combined with the fluency of the writing style made this a pleasure to read. There is the occasional repetition of similar information in different parts of the dissertation, and the very occasional typo. I'd suggest 85% as this seems to me first class work at the upper end of the first class range.
I joined Jan 2010, so I never got to experience 08 or 09, but reading this makes me sad at how poorly the users have treated this site. This site used to mean so much to so many people, and it actually used to be a lot of fun.
