Christer - FUMBBL Hall of Fame Builder

About Christer

Christer is the creator and principal owner of FUMBBL. This 30ish year old guy lives in Gothenburg in Sweden with his two cats and tends to be online during the most ungodly hours of the day. You'll usually find him idling in various IRC channels, either talking to people in private conversations, or simply being distracted elsewhere (WoW being a safe bet).

Likes: Programming, cats and geeky gadgets. Dislikes: Whiners and people who take things too seriously.

History of FUMBBL

The history of FUMBBL starts back in 2002, when Christer accidentally stumbled on to SkiJunkie?'s JavaBBowl back in 2002. At the time, the only real options for online play was the BBIrc based OLBBL and the PBeM based MBBL. SkiJunkie?'s client lacked a large number of features, but showed a lot of promise. The main problem was that there was nowhere to meet other people interested in playing using this client.

So instead of just waiting for someone else to start one, Christer decided to go ahead and run a small league with a handful of people. The league was called JLeague (J for Java), and was managed with a custom created application called LeagueManager? (which has since then been made publically available). The first season went well, and for the second season, an "open play" part was added. This generated a large influx of people to the league, taking the number of teams above 30. Due to the nature of LeagueManager?, this created a HUGE workload for Christer, who had to manually update all teams and make all skillrolls centrally. Somewhere along the line, a new website was set up and the name changed to FUMBBL.

Then, one fateful day in late 2002, the worst thing possible happened. The savefile for the league was corrupted and a large amount of information was lost. The need for something more automated was obvious, and Christer started to work on a web-based system. Around this time, a guy called Mr-Klipp had started to play and he approached Christer with the beginnings of a web-based system as well. In order to speed things up, they decided to pool their resources and for a few weeks, there was an intense amount of coding and testing going on. Lots of bugs were fixed and on January 3rd, 2003 the current FUMBBL system was taken out of "Beta" stage and the teams and matches reported since then are the ones you can find on the site even today.

At the start, the site was one division for open-play. There were no groups, no tournaments, no player images, no coach info. Basically, all you could do was to create teams, play and select skills. Over the years, a lot has happened and FUMBBL is now the largest Blood Bowl league in the world, far more active than any of the other options available.

Comments from FUMBBL Community