Fantasy Origin
A community for indie game developers that outlived its founder's ownership by a decade.
Fantasy Origin was my first virtual community, and the reason I can honestly say I've been building online communities since 1994. It grew straight out of game development. While building my console-style RPG The Legend of Talibah, I hit the wall every solo developer hits: I needed help with music and art. I went looking online and found a large but completely disorganized crowd of would-be RPG developers — all wanting the same kind of help, with no good way to find each other.
So I built a website where people could post when they needed help or had skills to offer. Essentially a classified-ads board for indie game collaborators. At the time I didn't think of it as a community. I thought of it as a tool to help people do what they were already trying to do.
It started in a subdirectory of my college web-hosting account and changed hosts several times as it grew. When I no longer had time to run it, a community member took it over and finally registered a real domain; it lived on under new stewardship for years after I stepped away. The lessons it taught me showed up in everything I built afterward.