In spring 2000, two computer game fans and programmers created a website called 'xenon.web.ag'. They took the name from a great Amiga game called 'Xenon' (with an even greater sequel - 'Xenon2 - Megablast'). This site should be a community for Austrian game developers and soon, the first companies joined xenon.web.ag: Chaosdesigns, Bug?Galore! and QSoft. These were followed by MillenniumArts, ScherfgenSoftware and PoisonBytes.
David Scherfgen, who lives in Germany, suggested that xenon.web.ag should open its gates to everybody who is interested in computer games and programming - no matter of his language or country. And since this day, everybody who is interested in developing games has been able to join Xenonaut's game developers' community. This should be stressed additionally by a .com adress. As 'xenon.com' was already taken, 'xenonaut.com' was chosen. How it came from Xenon to Xenonaut is a story too long to tell over the Internet, where most people still have to use telephone lines. During summer 2000, Xenonaut was closed and then, it reopened in October with a new layout. A couple of new members, mostly from Germany but also from Australia, the United States and other countries, joined. The next break came in February 2001, the site was closed again. But only for one month, this time. We used the time to add a new design with PHP and MySQL.
From March 2001 to October 2001 we were subhosted by Mathias Kanitz, the webmaster of Quellcodes.de. Quellcodes itself was hosted by www.krawall.de. In October he stopped the hosting relationship with www.krawall.de and so we also lost the web space. We decided to take a short time out to improve the site and come back after a 2 month break. It was not so easy to find a suitable hoster for our needs but we finally could launch Xenonaut in February 2002 with a new Hoster, www.freegamez.de..
After years of being hosted by other sites we realized that it is time to spend some money to have a good webspace. Nevertheless we decided to keep Xenonaut ad-free and also the services for our members should stay free.
To be continued one day (hopefully)