February 11, 2005 - Five years ago today, on February 11, 2000, IGN FilmForce arrived online. During that time, we've run more than 12,000 articles on about 2,200 movie and TV projects, including 777 movie reviews, and over 800 interviews. Why? Well, for you, of course. And also to satisfy our own obsessive-compulsive needs for both gathering production information and sharing it with you.

We can't help but feel that IGN FilmForce keeps getting better with each passing day, week, month, and year. And we hope you feel the same. On our five-year anniversary, we thought we'd take a look back at the big IGNFF moments of the past five years, and how we've evolved as a site – in both look & feel and in content.

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The Beginning

Way back when we launched the site, we stated that "the primary objective of IGN FilmForce is to cater to the needs of information-hungry movie fans. Through the contributions of industry contacts, studios, and production companies, we provide readers with general movie news, in-depth features, and interviews with a variety of industry leaders. While maintaining a professional journalistic standard, FilmForce is very much a 'fan site,' run by movie fans." They were fairly lofty goals for a site that had just arrived online but we're comfortable looking back on that statement today and feeling like we've accomplished what we originally set out to do.

We had a number of short news items and a few reviews on our first day as a site, but by far our biggest feature was Ken Plume's career-comprehensive interview with Frank Oz, covering his work with the Muppets through his pre-production work on The Score. The article's still a fascinating read today, so if you've never read it, be sure to check it out.


The Evolution of the Site: The Look

Many of you reading this today may not have even seen what IGN FilmForce used to look like. IGNFF has gone through four major front-page designs over the last five years; we've dug through some archives to give you a taste of the various past looks of the site...

The Original Look

Our original look was a little simpler than it is today. We had a cool graphical header with a filmstrip motif and logo (both of which we miss a little bit) but the rest of the site was pretty plain. Here's a look, courtesy of the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.

Redesign #1

In March 2001 we switched the site over to a look that we refer to as the "In the Spotlight" design. That look is actually still in use on our various movie channel pages (the latest of those being Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and War of the Worlds – designed, like the majority of our movie channels, by our on-staff graphics designer/writer, Paul Davidson). This first redesign featured a large graphic at the top of the page and an "in the spotlight" article below that on the lower right. Check out this Internet Archive page to take a look at our main page in this design.

Redesign #2

About a year and a half later, in August 2002, we switched over to our second redesign, with slightly smaller feature graphics in the top section of the page, and a lot more categorized listings in the lower sections. You can take a look here.

Redesign #3

Our third redesign, on May 27, 2004, is the one you still see on the site today. That's when we got our fancy Flash cover story display box and a lot more areas where we could graphically feature our various articles, along with those handy "Latest News" and "Latest Reviews" boxes that you can check throughout the day.