Ra_Zim and ZGF Gaming
Thanks for stopping by! My name is Stephen, though I mostly go by “Zim” from my last name. It has kind of been a nickname for many, many years now though I have had a couple iterations, such as “TheZim” or “MrZim” in my younger years. I finally settled on “Ra’Zim” or “Ra_Zim” because of two reasons. The first, I started working on a game’s story years ago where the main race wrote their names in that fashion, with their surname first, followed by the apostrophe, and then their given name. Second, I chose “Ra” because I’ve had a large fascination with Egyptian mythology since middle school.
I picked up streaming because of fond memories of being home sick from school and just having a good time watching my dad play the original Diablo. It was one of the few real bonding experiences I got to share with him and despite the misery of the various illnesses I dealt with, and still deal with, I remember those days fondly. I started streaming a little bit on the Internet somewhere around 2011 I believe, though it was sporadic and only on the rather lackluster (at least at that time) livestream.com. I had some fun with the friends I made on the net but just did it here and there. In addition, I’ve fancied myself a bit of an entertainer ever since my debut appearance as Rumpelstiltskin in high school.
Leading more to the site itself here, it started with Zim’s Gizmos. Zim’s Gizmos was going to be my game development company when I finally got to it someday, actually came up with that name in middle school when challenged to find something I wanted to do by my pre-algebra teacher. It wound up being mostly a forum hosted on a free hosting site that constantly had an ad on the bottom of every page, but was otherwise my own setup. It was used to just chat with friends I had moved away from and we would also develop the story of the world of “Gizmos” where my name actually came from. Zim’s Gizmos was unofficially established in 2008.
Now, finally on to ZGF itself. ZGF has been a passion project for me since 2009. With the world of Gizmos, set in a sci-fi universe filled with furries (before I even knew what furries were) and fantasy races like dwarves, elves, and so on (they originally lived on Earth, but abandoned the planet in favor of greener pastures away from the apes that were evolving), we had to have ships. I designed my own flagship, the ZGF Soanth (so-ant-th). You probably notice the relevancy there with those letters now, though I still won’t reveal exactly what they stand for! That has since turned into ZGF being a sort of “calling card” to most of my other projects, ZGF Minecraft, ZGF Gaming, etc.
As you may notice above, ZGF Gaming started with Minecraft. Friends and I were interested in this weird new game and so we picked it up, I made a small website and we chatted and shared screenshots. From there ZGF existed and then got left for a time when I had lost Internet for a time. I picked up ZGF again when a newer friend was like: Dude, you should check out Feed the Beast! I, of course, had no idea what he was talking about and then it turned out it was modded Minecraft. I picked it up again, checked it out, made a server and website and bam, ZGF was back again! A couple more years went by and I started expanding from just Minecraft into Terraria and there was even a 7 Days to Die server once it came available (I was a Kickstarter backer for them). So, ZGF Minecraft didn’t really fit anymore. Thus we renamed to an admittedly generic name, but it works well: ZGF Gaming.
Since then we’ve grown at a slow, but steady pace. We always focus on friendship first, not just numbers. ZGF has never existed as a place to just have a bunch of strangers who happen to talk about the same things. ZGF has always been about friendship, no matter if you identify as a human, furry, or Apache attack helicopter. We’re here for games, and that’s what matters.