Allakhazam

Allakhazam.com

Type	MMORPG Fansite
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Los Angeles, United States
Number of employees	approx. 30
Website	www.allakhazam.com

As of December 7, 2008 it has over 1.4 million registered usernames and over 10 million posts between the forums and individual pages for each item in every game covered on the site.

The site's primary purpose is to enable registered users to search a range of databases relating to specific MMORPGs. These contain details of Quests, NPCs and in-game items, as well as interactive maps and advice on game-play. As the site developed a significant user-base, the interactive nature of the discussion allowed users to post comments on the various database items, thus ensuring the content and advice to gamers was current.

In addition to these databases, registered users can also download content to enable offline review of their current game characters, game patches and other gaming resources.

In recent years, the discussion forums have become an increasingly important feature of the site, with specific forums dedicated to each of the supported games, and more generalist areas such as Technical Support and Out of Topic discussions (for non-game related discussion).

Allakhazam.com was started in 1999 by Jeffrey Moyer as a simple guide to the game EverQuest on a free web hosting service. It quickly became known by the EverQuest player base for its extensive quest descriptions. Mr. Moyer then teamed up with programmer Andy Sharp, acquired the url allakhazam.com, and the site was expanded into a database format covering quests, items, mobs and other aspects of the game. By the year 2000, Allakhazam was the most popular site on the internet covering Everquest and was getting over 10 million page views a month. Many consider Allakhazam to be the innovator of the gaming database format that is now followed by a number of other networks.

In late 2000, the internet experienced a vast reduction of advertising revenue that has been referred to as the Dot-com bubble. Most gaming sites, including Allakhazam, lost the majority of their revenue. Many popular gaming sites went out of business soon thereafter and have not been seen since. Allakhazam weathered this storm by establishing a premium membership service where users paid for certain advanced searches and other features designed to make their game play easier. At its peak, the Allakhazam premium service had over 45,000 subscribers, making it one of the more successful services of its kind ever.

The success of EverQuest inspired other publishers to release their own online role playing games. As new games were released, Allakhazam added sites for them. Each Allakhazam site was popular with the gaming communities of the individual games. The release of Final Fantasy XI, however, was of particular note. Because publisher Square Enix did not launch its own official forums for the game, the Allakhazam FFXI forums became the main forums for that game. This led to a significant expansion of the entire Allakhazam forum system.