Warthog's Game Leagues
Warthog's Game Leagues was a website that allowed you to create your own customized game leagues and tournaments. This was inspired by the desire to keep track of statistics and rankings with my friends playing Duke Nukem 3D against each other. There was another website that had leagues for many games such as Duke Nukem 3D, but you were restricted to their system and their rules. The leagues were also global, so you could not just have your own with friends.
My website aimed to change all of that and be a lot more generic. Instead of forcing specific games for users, you could create your own league for anything - it didn't have to be a video game. You could use it for local football leagues or even board games. You set all of the rules, picked your own website themes, and managed everything. If you wanted to keep it restricted to a group of friends you could make it a private league, and rankings were based on the standard Chess rating system.
As a supplement, you could also create your own tournaments and have them either count toward league rankings or be entirely separate entities.
The site is currently on hiatus, but at its peak it served nearly 5,000 players across 400+ leagues, and it recorded around 110,000 matches and 13,000 tournaments. We also ran some promotional events, like the one for Midway's $100,000 NBA Ballers: Phenom Tournament.
History
Internet cable connections were not yet readily available in the late 1990s, so I used a modem to play Duke Nukem 3D with friends and classmates, and we wanted to keep track of our matches and rankings. I built my first Linux machine and went to work writing the program in C++. From there I converted the system to CGI scripts and made a website, which eventually led me to learn PHP/MySQL and convert the site to use that.
This eventually became Warthog's Game Leagues, a site where you could create your own leagues and tournaments for any game. It was modeled off of Case's Ladder, but you couldn't create your own leagues there, set your own rules, or have private leagues. My website was the first and largest of its kind to offer this.
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