History of AuraGaming

History

AuraGaming was founded in late 2008 (presumably November) by Cody O as a San Andreas Multiplayer and World of Warcraft community. It was a small but active enough community with a Simple Machine Forum on auragaming.co.cc. It's not entirely known how ownership changed hands, but community member “sheep” took over as community owner in mid 2009 and the community focused only on SA:MP. To our pleasant surprise, the community actually gained a fairly active player base, with 10-15 active players and a SAMP server with an average of about 7 players. We also had our own 100 slot Ventrilo as well as a domain name - auragaming.com - with an elegant vBulletin forum. The summer passed and, due to cost issues, the SAMP server was shut down. The community reeled back though, and produced its own WoW and Counter Strike:Source server. Unfortunately, though, those didn't last either. Around October through November, the community was hanging by a thread, with some talks of a new SAMP server and even it's own original RPG game. Both ideas faded away to failure, and the community was pretty much dead by December, with only sheep and Stylo logging on to the forums to take care of banning the spambots. By the end of December 2009, the community was dead.

Then, on February 18th 2010, T Ray and Stylo decided to start it up again. I also told L337 about the plan to reopen a gaming community I'd been a part of for a while. I set up a temporary website at freewebs and within the week, we had a SAMP server up again. We had another good run until March, but then, mysteriously, everyone stopped playing. We had to shut the server down. May, April, and June came along with many ideas - A Counter-Strike Source server that didn't last, a very short-lived Habbo Hotel server, and a MapleStory server which was actually successful until late July. In September we attempted doing All Points Bulletin and Modern Warefare 2, with more of a focus on APB, but, unfortunately, APB was shut down, eliminating the chance of making a server. MW2 never got off the ground either, due to some coding issues. September came and went and along came October. APB and MW2 fizzled out and, once again, we were nearly freezing to death in the cold winter. We attempted to get SAMP back up in November-December, but that failed. We finally decided to rethink things. SAMP is just not the direction we needed to go, since ever since it's unfortunate end in the summer of 2009, it's never gotten back up to it's full potential.

December 2010 brought yet another resurgence for Aura Gaming as we discovered a then-upcoming game that was full of promise: Minecraft. In early 2011, we ran not one, but two stable Minecraft classic servers. We had a great Player base with the Minecraft Classic server. Then on February 24th, 2011 we started our first Minecraft Beta Server, owned by T Ray. It maintained the most dedicated as well as large player base we've ever had for any game. On March 16th, 2011, after several map changes, the Minecraft Beta server was temporarily closed due to lack of organization, money issues, drama, inactivity, and admin boredom. It finally reopened on July 5th, 2011 with improved organization, a reworked admin and moderator roster, and new rules. Ownership changed hands to L337. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks in the admins started to get bored again. It was taken down for a couple days in order to create a new “megamap” that included key elements of all the past maps. It was also whitelisted, and while that was successful for a couple days, it quickly became inactive.

On August 1st, 2011 AuraGaming was officially closed down, with its Minecraft server going down with it. Currently, there are no plans on ever restarting the community. However, the site continued to run until the payments were stopped for the web hosting company. L337 ended up buying auragaming.com so it cannot be recreated. Unfortunately auragaming.net had expired with the web hosting company and couldn't be transferred out or bought out.

As of October 30th, 2012 auragaming.net was owned by an Advertising Company that probably won't be selling that domain, and now is considered a premium domain.

On April 9th, 2013 The original Community Owner, L337, put up a teaser web page on the Auragaming.com domain. The Page was all black and the text was centered saying “Coming Near You!” On April 10th, 2013 the forums opened by to the public, and emails were sent to all the original members of the old Aura Gaming forums. However in early 2014, on the official Aura Gaming Facebook Page it was stated that the community owner was going on hiatus due to life obligations. Later on in the year a comment was left on the same post stated that the community is closed for good.

Aura Gaming will not be coming back for any reason at all. The domain and name will only be intact for historical purposes only. As of February 2021, The front page shows the last logo used for Aura Gaming and states (R.I.P Aura Gaming (November 2008 - 2014)) a link to this wiki page is also included on the page. Later in 2024, the Wiki was removed in favor of just using a single domain/site to show only the history of this community.