GTASeries.com is no more, soon to be in different hands.

Though this 1 sentence basically sums it all up, I figured an explanation would be nice (I could've just pulled the plug).
So I've taken some time to write up the full history about me and the website, it looks longer than it actually is...

1. History

Despite being a huge fan of the first GTA and it's London 1969 mission pack, I never really liked GTA2 all that much.
However when GTA III was released on the PS2 in 2001, the series got my interest again and even more than before.
After a few months I realised that I knew a lot about the game when talking to friends about it and figured I could put that knowledge to some actual use...
With internet being relative small (compared to nowadays) I found some GTA related forums such as gamegossip.com, where I shared some of my experience and knowledge of the GTA games. Being visualminded, I got a crappy tv-card and learned some html, to put together some pages with images as guides/references for stuff like vehicles and collectables in the games.
Launching my GTA related pages on my personal website, it did reasonably well at first, which made me think about giving it a completely seperate website for the GTA stuff (hence the birth of gtaseries.com).

Over the first few years, with GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, I put quite some time in making screenshots and later also videos.
The website did reasonably well, taking some visitors from gamegossip and a handfull of other forums I posted on. Around the same time, fellow gamegossip'ers Zidane and Kodo started their own GTA website: gtagaming.com, which grew a community pretty fast compared to my failed attempt to opening my own forum.
So, I killed my forum and tried to help people elsewhere with my information and screens, even offering some webspace for other people's stunt-videos and some mods, but I posted even less than before, focussing more on updating my website.
Though I thought to have some decent content, the visitorcount still remained on the low side, which led to new others ways of getting people to my site: affiliating some other GTA fansites (amongst which were the wellvisited gtagaming.com and planetgta.com) which got me a few more visitors again, but still I never managed to get in line with the bigger sites, nor aknowledged by Rockstar as a fansite on their webring (I'd love to have gotten some of those goodies for free :P ).
However, I wanted to keep trying and at least provide a decent website for those that did visit my website and myself.

2. Development

Though mostly over the first half of the past 10 years, the website got more and more content and features, some not at all useful, others more so. As mentioned earlier, starting with mostly screenshots and videos (even mirroring Rockstar's trailers when the launch of San Andreas pretty much knocked down the internet at the time), I later added more useful information including mission guides, cheats, maps and gameplay tips.
With GTAIII and Vice City being pretty much complete, San Andreas was a handfull, as much as I enjoyed the game, it was a pain in the ass to fully update the website due to the size of the game, but worth it in the end.
Later, I got more systems and updated the website with the other non PS2 GTA games. The "series" concept I had in mind from the start, was starting to show, but when the PSP games were released, updating all the pages by hand was taking as much time as creating the content itself, which was taking the fun out of it.
An easier way of updating the website had to be possible, which was the start of my programming interest/career, but that being a timeconsuming one, it caused an even bigger delay in updating the website for the next few GTA releases.
Around the same time, school started to get more timeconsuming and by the time the next games were released, the time to update the site went downhill even more.

Learning how to program with PHP and how to create "dynamic" websites was a part of a course at school and got my interest real fast, all kinds of concepts I had from the start were suddenly becoming possible, but cost even more time.
The new website was originally targetted for a pre GTAIV release, intending to update GTAIV and the missing games following shorty after.
Being as picky as I am, it never seemed good enough, causing the next few years to fly by.
Though in the background some of those changes have been integrated, it never made a release noticable to the visitors.
Eventually rewriting the new website for roughly 4 times, every time with it's own set of improvements, it just never seemed good enough, though partly in design, which isn't my strong side anyway.

After having invested a lot of time and a decent amount of money in the project without a release, it did pay off in some ways...
I learned a lot about webdevelopment in those years, some in my spare time, a little at school and most at my internship during graduation.
After gaining all this knowledge and experience in creating such systems I am now working fulltime as a web- and appdeveloper.
Though it did seem like the perfect job for me, unfortunately it did not have a positive effect on the website, as much as I love my job, the fun gets taken out when it's all you do for, also in your spare time.
The latest version however, created in mere months and close to being half completed, was actually targetted and on schedule for a January 2013 release.
But then I fucked up more than ever before, while upgrading my Operating System, it appeared I did not copy my files to the backup disk, causing unrecoverable data loss which wiped out the project in a mere second.
So here's a lesson: always make sure you backup your data twice!!!

3. In conclusion

With the visitor count dropping already over the past few years and having less time, it made me question Gtaseries.com's lifespan before, but this was the final blow.
Though I can't blame anyone but myself, I let my website down, realising my GTASeries.com is no more!
Managing a website about something as complex as the GTA games takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you're doing it by yourself.
As much as I originally enjoyed creating it and was looking forward to getting back into it with the release of GTA 5, I am ready to accept it's faith. Despite those setbacks, I'm still happy to have survived a decent number of other GTA fansites, but I just can't keep up anymore.

Honoustly, this is the hardest decision I've ever made in my life, the website used to be my pride and joy and just about my only hobby.
I'm sure when GTAV is released, this will be a smack in my face and I might regret my decision to quit, but this isn't working out anymore.
I was (and still am) a huge fan of the games and will continue to follow them extensively.

Recently, I posted some pictures, which showed my GTA collection I built up over the years, here it is again (can't say I'm not devoted :p).
And yes, I did play all those games' versions, except for the Japanese releases, though I have to admit to not having finished GTA Advance.
My favorite so far has to be San Andreas, closely winning from Vice City due to it's variety in environments with the least favorite being Advance and then Chinatown Wars. I did however like the DS (and later iPad/iPhone)'s use of touch controls/minigames in Chinatown Wars.

The year 2016

So yeah, even though the new website still has an uncertain future, I am still a GTA fan, who likes to collect GTA stuff.
Bigger version after the click though, this is undoable on such small an image

So, now what?

As of next month, this url will be part of the (other) GTA-Series.com.
Only shortly after I started this website, I was notified that there was another website known as GTA-Series.com (note the hyphen), an italian fansite, that started shortly before my GTASeries.com. It's my pleasure to pass them this url.
Thanks to all that visited my site over the years, I hope to not having let you down.

As a closing statement, I would like to refer you to the following great GTA fansites, that have experienced roughly the same ride, but slighty better and are still going strong, I wish them the best...

gta-series.com
gtagaming.com
gtawarehouse.com
thegtaplace.com
gtanet.com
Ofcourse there are many more great sites, but these came to mind first, I did not leave anyone out on purpose...

Regards,
YMe369
@Yme369