Viper
Posted: November 23rd, 2022, 2:01 pm
What happened to Viper? Is he still around?
Unfortunately he's been missing in action since May with no way that I can think of to reach him or find out what happened. He doesn't respond to PM's or e-mails. All I know is his first name is Mark, age I think in his 50s, and he's from Australia, so that's not a lot to go on. I also know he went by Still Linksing over at Links Corner.
He joined this site in 2019 and contributed a great deal to the PGA 2000 community, the biggest thing being researching and solving the graphical issues in Windows 10. Around late 2020 I decided to make him a moderator. I went without moderators for a while since there wasn't a whole lot of activity here anyway but we were starting go through some spam issues and he was here to catch it more than I was.
He was the driver behind bringing the JN community over here. Without him you guys wouldn’t be here. My connection to the Jack series was only with JNSE, as I had switched to the Headgate series of games (FPS: Golf, PGA '99, PGA '00) in '98 because of the mouse swing. I had planned (and still do plan) to host the JNSE content here but that was the extent of my ambition for the site. Just host the content for the three main games I had spent so much time with. Viper saw the issues coming for the larger JN community though and thought this would be a good new home for it. I tried to join Golden Bear's Den at that time but there was no way to get a new account approved so I just relied on him to hear what was going on.
He had mentioned to me several times that in a few years he planned to take an early retirement and pour a lot of effort into promoting all of the old golf games on this site. I liked the idea of bringing all of the old golf games under one site like the old Course Depot days. With each community getting smaller by the day, consolidating seemed like a good way to keep an active community going. I still hope that happens someday but the chances of it have been severely impacted by his absence now. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to get the opportunity to work in the real golf course design business now but the side effect is my career is keeping me quite busy and limiting my time available to put into this site. The site pretty much runs itself as is but I really needed someone like Viper to take on the work if we were going to try to expand like that. Fortunately Galen and Randy (gtejoe) have taken on a lot of that work to help get us up and running for JN at least.