I was 19, already building websites since about 1996 - "web designer", we were called - and I wanted to learn Classic ASP. I'd grown up on ROCKSTAR! and Rockstar Ate My Hamster on the Commodore 64, so the thought was: why not make something like that, but a bit different? Making things is how you learn.
The name was older than the game. Back in 1996, when I first got the internet (on a US Robotics 33.6k modem - snazzy), Hotmail had nothing left that wasn't taken and I refused numbers, so I smashed together Ziggy Stardust and Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers: Zigire. I'd registered zigire.com because... username. So when the game needed a home, it already had one.
You signed with Rowe Recordings (named after my school mate Adam Rowe - cheers Adam) and your in-game manager was "your long-time friend Carl". Subtle. I dropped a link in the Championship Manager IRC channel, added a refer-a-friend button, and off it went: 900 signups by September, over 11,000 by the end of November, and at the peak something like 25,000 visits a week.
Hosting started at £50 a month; within two years the costs had multiplied sixteen times over. So the game went pay-to-play at £1.50 a month and the homepage title changed, honestly, to "a not so free online game". You could pay by PayPal, by cheque in the post, or by ringing a premium-rate number and scribbling down a ten-digit keycode. Most of the players were kids without bank cards. It was 2003; that was the technology we had.
It wasn't enough. In mid-2003, somewhere between a house move and a pile of payment admin, the game quietly stopped. The site said "coming back soon". It didn't.
The game returned at therockstargame.com - free again, funded by the great currency of the 2005 internet: pop-up ads (sorry). v3 never shipped; this was the old code brought back to life, and then it just kept going.
Two decades of maintenance mode. No new features, just a world that kept ticking: charts every night, bands rising and splitting, the same menu - Write Songs, Go on Tour, Chart Watch - that would navigate today's game almost unchanged. The Internet Archive has the game alive in every single year from 2005 to 2026, still saying "Established in 2001", with a hundred-odd players online right to the end.
I'd finally started rewriting the game properly. Mid-rewrite, I opened up the old creaky MySQL server so I could work on it remotely, and didn't lock it down to my own address. Rookie mistake. Within an hour or two somebody had got in and deleted every database. Twenty-five years of world history, gone. There were no backups. I know. I know.
Honestly though? It turned out to be a good thing. The rewrite became a proper fresh start instead of a careful one, and the game came back better than it's ever been: rebuilt from scratch, relaunched July 2026, new stuff landing every week - streaming, collabs, record certifications, award ceremonies. It all goes on the changelog, same as it has since "Practice sorted (well 90%)" in May 2001.
When we launched, the closest thing out there was PopEx - not really the same kind of game, more a stock market for music artists. Project Rockstar and Music Maven came later. (Copied me? Maybe. Well, probably.) So did Popmundo, which I hear is still out there in maintenance mode - respect, I know that road well. I spent a while keyword-stuffing "deff. not Project Rockstar" into my title tag, which I maintain was fair play - SEO has always been SEO. The rest have all gone by the wayside. Somehow, we're still here.