Sailor Moon Center was started by the mysterious “Thu” (known to IRC staff as “SailorCenter”) in August 2001 and was known as “Thu’s Anime Multimedia Center”. It offered low quality downloads of Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2 episodes along with Winamp skins, music, pictures &c.
Shockingly, it used the same layout until April 2, 2005 when we premiered the lovely new design that a staff admin, Jojo, made for our layout contest. He won a $50 gift certificate, but he deserved far more than that. ^^
I (himura_KAORU) first found SMC through their IRC channel sometime around the summer of 2002. I was a new IRC user looking for those SenshiTV .rm encoded VKLL Sailor Moon Stars fansub episodes and the friendly staff at #SailorMoonCenter took time to teach me how to use a file-server to download the episodes in the channel. I was so grateful that I started my own file-server in the IRC channel and Thu/SailorCenter soon made me a staff member.
Eventually, we decided to expand our Sailor Moon offerings by encoding our own episodes from DVD to DivX .avi and eventually XviD .ogm dual audio. I assisted Thu as she ripped and encoded the $30 pirated DVDs she bought on eBay. =P I suggested the idea of offering the episodes on torrent, thus our BitTorrent Tracker was born in January 2005.
After Thu finished encoding S and SuperS seasons she asked me to take over Sailor Moon Center in March 2005. I was very honored and a bit overwhelmed, but I gladly accepted. My first task was to RE-encode SuperS season using actual R1 DVDs. >.< Once that and the 3 movies were done we turned our focus to the final Sailor Moon season: Sailor Stars! Through a huge donation effort, we were able to raise the $270 needed to purchase the entire Stars series on imported R2 DVDs!
Then disaster struck… we lost the domain “sailormooncenter.com” in June 2006 because Thu did not transfer any accounts over to me and none of us could contact her once she left. We purchased “sailormooncenter.net”, paid for a new host and moved everything there.
In May 2007, we introduced our previous layout, designed by Serenity as a favour to us! In August 2007 we were finally able to purchase the “sailormooncenter.COM” domain again.
In August 2009, I decided to pass Sailor Moon Center to KAKERU and ^Alchemist^, who have been members of the group for several years.
Sailor Moon Center would not be here today without all the amazing people on staff and friends who have helped us in so many ways! My thanks go out to my staff (past and present) and all the visitors we have had who have appreciated all our hard work.
The SMC Staff welcomes you and we hope you enjoy your time with us at Sailor Moon Center!
Written by himura_KAORU of Sailor Moon Center.