Ghostbusters Prop Archive

URL: http://www.gbprops.com/HistoryThe Ghostbusters Prop Archive started out as a part of Slime Square, and was originally titled "The Slime Square Prop Site". The site first opened under the name "Ghostbusters Prop Archive" on October 1st in 2000. The original Slime Square Prop Site was started in a tradition similar to Eraser99's Ghostbusters Prop Site in 1998, where users would email in photographs of their own custom made props. The site's main draw was the 75 reference photographs of a Ghostbusters Hero Proton Pack taken at Planet Hollywood at the Mall of America in Bloomington Minnesota. The photographs were taken with a Sony Mavica digital camera at 1024x768 resolution and were stored on 4 floppy disks holding about 21 photos each. The less than a megapixel photographs were viewed and downloaded hundreds of times in 2000, and would become the basis to start a revolution in Ghostbusters prop making. Towards the end of 2000, a German Ghosthead named Stefan Otto (Bug Stomper) began submitting CAD renderings and drawings of the Proton Pack that he based on the Planet Hollywood reference photos. He used the photos directly to accurately come up with correct proportions and measurements based off of found items. The plans were released on the Ghostbusters Prop Archive on July 31st, 2001 and were adopted immediately by prop builders as the ultimate set of measurements for the Proton Pack. In the beginning of 2001, the Prop Archive suffered from several identity crisis’s in terms of design and main goals. In early February the site was given a facelift to a purely yellow on black design, many agreed that it was not as nice the previous design. The site was also struggling to become anything but a quick stop on the road to prop building as other sites like A Site About Props (A.S.A.P) became a large community that gave users the ability to discuss their creations. Something needed to change... By the end of 2001, there was a new website which offered Ghostbusters Prop builders a new and easy way to submit and upload their own prop photos, Ghostbusters.net. The site was beyond any other existing website in scale and scope that it was hard to find a reason to keep the site up. In December 2001 the Ghostbusters Prop Archive went offline. Several months went by and the site remained offline. It was not until May 4th 2002 when the site would come back... and it would be better than ever. New to the site was an entire system programmed in PHP that would provide the ability to login and upload Prop photos, as well as send messages to other users. It was starting to become a cohesive community all under the new domain name: http://www.GBProps.com/