As a continuous Home user for the better part of three years, AlphaZone4 has been my number one source of information to Home-related content. I can’t recall the last time I visited the official forum, but it was shortly after the redesign, and I haven’t been back since. While the official Home blog still provides a great deal of information regarding upcoming updates, AlphaZone4 continues to be the source for information and the site I visit on a near daily basis. As a reward hunter, it has been somewhat of a scavenger hunt checklist, and I look to it for tips and a heads up on the available content. For all it has provided for me personally – and the community as a whole – I am grateful for the site.

But it didn’t start out that way.

What was so special about Xi that drew you in? How did it differ from other games out there for PlayStation?

I think I found out about Xi when reading something on TheSixthAxis, I pretty much used that site as my main top source for news back then (now it’s Twitter – which I wouldn’t call an improvement). I had actually been in the Home Closed Beta a few months before it had opened, it was basically a secret virtual world for the “special” beta players, which brewed a secret club of elite users. Needless to say, that never pulled me in, as there was barely enough community spirit there then to scrape onto the side of a crouton.

I think ARGs have their place and always will, but I don’t think it will ever occur in Home again. An ARG should be a time-exclusive event in order to promote something else. For Xi, that was about promoting the possibilities of Home, which I would say was incredibly successful in doing so, since it has also created an entire game world along the way, which I don’t think any other ARG has ever managed to do.

As the number-one fan site for Home, do you think Home would have the following it has now if it were not for Xi?

I don’t think Home would have had the impact it had if it weren’t for Xi. I personally only got into Home because of Xi, and I wouldn’t be interested in Home now if Xi hadn’t happened. Because Xi forced the community to work together, it started the community going, including many friendships that still hold today.

Would AlphaZone4 exist without Xi? And how did it transition from being solely a Xi fan site into something so much larger?

The name “AlphaZone4″ comes from the three Alpha Zones that were (and still are) in the Xi Hub. At the time Xi had only just started and the Alpha Zones were still locked off, so we were hedging our bets that there wouldn’t be a real Alpha Zone 4 in Home itself! It’s something of a silly name, which has been fairly unproductive in terms of getting people to remember the name and our Google Rank.

What do you miss the most about Xi? Do you expect to regain some of that from Continuum, or do you expect something different?

I miss the amount of socializing that went on during the original Xi. There were way too many parties back then, people had events for the sake of getting together and the lure of a free item wasn’t needed. There were these 24 hour parties where people would try and stay on Home for as long as humanly possible and all sorts of fantastic events.

I think with Continuum, the social side is slightly lost, partially down to how big the new space actually is, meaning it can often be tricky to accidentally find a cluster of people to hang out with. However, there are some really neat areas inside the Continuum which are great for hosting parties, I think over time it’ll pick up again, but it’s not going to be as easy as last time, particularly now that the game is always working, and there isn’t this driving force to complete things as soon as humanly possible which was present in the previous Xi.

 Did you ever expect AlphaZone4 to grow to the level it has become? It’s basically the Encyclopedia of Home, and serves as Home’s unofficial database.

I never expected AlphaZone4 to be all that popular and I’ve never really had any intention of trying to force it upon people to make it popular! There has been a rule since day one about our traffic levels and if they drop below a certain level we’ll just stop. One part of that rule is that we don’t spam Twitter/Facebook/forums etc. with our content, which I think is really important to get a realistic idea of how you’re doing. We want people to only come to our site if we’re producing the right content and I’m really happy to see they are. For me, I’m glad we can help people out and it’s very clear that there is a need for such a service, which is seriously lacking in any official implementation.

Do you feel Continuum could be the end of an era and the end of Xi, or will community support bring it back again after this run?

I don’t think Continuum is an end of an era or indeed Xi. The “Xi era” ended a very long time ago, and Continuum is hopefully just the start of a new era of gaming in Home.

It has to be interesting covering Xi again; does it feel like returning to AZ4’s roots?

It’s been a lot of fun catching up with some “Home Veterans” who have come back to check our the return of Xi. I’ve really enjoyed digging in some of my site backups to find some old bits and pieces from “the old days”. Covering Xi again has been really awesome, we have been slightly involved with the Continuum hype campaign, in the way of some “leaked” emails. Although I’ve known about Xi2 and the Continuum for quite a while now, I’ve been kept in the dark about all the story details, which has been really nice to enjoy the story with everybody else.

It can be honestly stated that no one from the Home community has put in as much work as you have, and developed such a fantastic resource for all to enjoy. What do you personally get out of it?

Personally, I’m an information gatherer. I just love archiving and keeping data alive, which is the point of AlphaZone4 – we collect weekly store updates and the Heads Up into one place for historical reasons. I really hope in the very near future to release some new tools that lets people explore our data better than ever, which will be really cool, since sometimes I wonder if even Sony knows what’s available in their Home stores.

Looking forward, where does AlphaZone4 go from here?

We’re also going to get back into doing more events. We used to have regular parties where we would flash-mob spaces in Home, which were always a laugh.

But we’ll be here as long as we think we’re needed. The goal of AlphaZone4 when we moved to be a PlayStation Home fan-site was always to “bring down the walled garden around Home” – something we personally think should be done officially, but with nothing like that on the horizon, we’re going to continue to keep track of what’s changing in Home, if for nothing else, just to satisfy our own OCD.

Xi, as an outsider looking back and trying to imagine what it was like, is an experience which hasn’t – and probably can’t – be recreated. But it is clear what an impact it had in culminating the community which continues to grow. As a user who loves the Home platform for what it was, what it is and what it is becoming, I look back with melancholy at the idea of how close to fizzling out Home really was before Xi. Like with all organizations which have had a tide turning impact on events, we take them for granted until we realize just how invaluable they really are.

I am grateful for Xi, I am grateful for the community it helped to bring together and build into the what the Home community has become and grateful for AlphaZone4 and the hand it has played in the evolution of Home itself.

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