Back in 2000, the 5th installment of the Tomb Raider franchise (Tomb Raider: Chronicles) was published. The PC platform included a second disc containing the Tomb Raider Level Editor. That kick-started  a great community that 20 years later is still thriving!

Many people went on and created additional unofficial tools that accompanied the editor. Being a huge fan of the games(up until then, that is...), I made a small contribution by writing a simple texture utility called TBuilder:

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It probably wasn't anymore than 500 LOC and all it did was a very simple job. To my surprise, it proved to be very useful and I got tons of emails from people wanting to buy me a beer or two. That was the early days of the web, and to be loved online felt weird.

I had very limited programming experience and that was only with Visual Basic 6.0. Not to be confused with VB.NET, Visual Basic was the kid that you either loved to death or hated as much as your mother-in-law. The truth is that it allowed non-programmers like me, to create buggy software in a matter of days, that somehow worked. This to my eyes is a clear winner so fuck the naysayers. It could have been Python-For-Windows, but as with all the few things that Microsoft got right, it had the burden of carrying the Microsoft name.

The thing is, the damned thing won't die! If you head over to the "Visual Basic 6 and Earlier" section of the vbforums, it's still hugely active, more-so  than the rest of the forum. Long live VB!