In AD 2101, war was beginning...
Or not. It was the beginning of July 2002. I was your average fansub viewer. You know, leech, view, and leech some more. My real-life friends, Reikoku, DJ Killa-Kan, and Meophist, were the same. We had viewing marathons of specific series. It was a good life, and we were happy.
However, it was an unfulfilling one. After a marathon of Iketeru Futari, Reikoku wondered if we could try fansubbing. We all thought, why not? It would give us something to do over the summer. After some uninspiring suggestions (you don't want to know), DJ Killa-Kan coined our group's name as the No Name Losers! We vowed to be something other than "just another n00b group". However, that was a just a farfetched dream at the moment.
Now we needed something to do. I became attracted to a small group called AnimeForce (now dead) after enjoying their Canvas and Tokyo Mew Mew fansubs. Hey, here's some old-school trivia for you: did you know that Ishin-Anime was formed after some disgruntled people in AnimeForce left? AnimeForce soon went down the gutter by the end of the year, while Ishin-Anime went on to become a very reputable group, and is still active to this day.
Anyway, after a little chat in AnimeForce's chatroom, their leader, Tyreal, handed us a raw for something called Ai Yori Aoshi episode 11. It was licensed a couple of weeks ago back then, but it was the only thing we could get our hot little hands on. Besides, no one ever notices the first release of a group anyway! The thing was that the two groups that were still continuing Ai Yori Aoshi, AnimeJunkies (also now dead) and AnimeOne (still around and are one of the biggest fansub groups in the community), had below-average releases of this that ticked off Reikoku. We would attempt to one-up them at their own game, but we had no intentions of continuing Ai Yori Aoshi after doing a couple of episodes.
Thus, the No Name Losers was in business! I know this story isnt as inspiring as, say, the KFC story, but we're just normal people! Hee hee~
Armed with the AYA 11 raw and the goal of beating the "competition", we set out to sub it. The first revision of the script was done in five days on the 13th, but Tyreal took another four days to time the karaoke and encode it. He didn't want his name in the credits, probably because he knew how bad we were. Anyway, we beat them by less than half a day and it was distributed in the newsgroups and on a couple of fservs in #animeforce. The four of us did an all-nighter of Super Smash Bros. Melee to celebrate our first release.
It received less than lukewarm feedback, because most people simply waited and got AJ's version the next day. I can safely say that less than 20 people obtained this file outside the newsgroups (remember, there was no such thing as BitTorrent back then). Personally, I think that AJ's and AonE's version is better than ours, simply because of our poor editing skills and the ugly encode. Of course, this served as a huge building block for AYA 12.
We failed. This one stunk up the place, and we're not ashamed to admit it. However, we would learn from our mistakes... |
