Regional BBS art scenes
Some area codes were livelier corners of cyberspace than others. A more populous region had more residents, and statistically there would be more computer users, more modemmers among them, more underground BBS callers among the modemmers, and, on average, more underground computer artists jockeying for status among more crews of their peers. But even among area codes with vibrant BBS ecosystems, not all of them featured a cadre of underground computer artists. In the area code 604, we were fortunate enough to have enough interested parties nearby to sustain a bustling local scene. By contrast, people living in remote areas—without a critical mas of kindred spirits in their neighborhood—could only participate through expensive or risky long-distance modem calls or finding affordable Internet access (which in its pre-web days, served as more of a supplement to BBS activities than the unstoppable quasher of them that was around the corner).
These floating itinerant underground computer artists—lacking the option of simply throwing in their lot with a local crew—faced the formidable challenge of joining a remote artgroup, knowing full well they’d never be fully immersed in the selected artgroup's local culture. Some crews hosted real-life get-togethers, and purely local phenomena like regional politics, news, and weather events could dominate the artgroup's discussions and influence the art it was putting out. Remote members, unable to experience those local realities firsthand, were rarely more than peripheral participants in the cultural life of distant crews they hooked up with.
Though there were exceptions, most regions didn’t have large enough local art scenes to support multiple viable, competing crews at the same time. Typically, one crew would serve as the natural destination for the underground artists of its area. Occasionally, small Salons des Refusés might briefly emerge, like 604's The Supreme Couriers (TsC) formed by applicants who hadn’t yet cut the mustard. (These groups usually lasted only as long as it took for the slighted artists to successfully reapply to the dominant crew.)
When a region's major group dissolved, however, multiple claimants to its throne might spontaneously emerge. In our case, when iMPERiAL shut down, Mistigris quickly found itself in competition with the spontaneously-emerged Patriot, The Clan, and Wild Buffalo TamerZ — all hoping to scoop up former iMPERiAL's talent and become its natural successor. Fab One's Patriot and Grateful Dead's The Clan didn't have enough juice to make an honest go of things on their own, so they merged—much like PAiN and POiSON had in the 604's art scene prehistory, initially forming the NWA that kicked off our lineage—and created RAiD, with whom we waged a brief war of attrition. The hope was that by outlasting our rivals, we'd get to a "winner takes all" situation where all of a region's talent might work together under one roof. In reality, more often it looked like the losers left the field, albeit sometimes only for a spell, and we just temporarily enjoyed a lack of competition as a destination for emerging talent.
People better acquainted with professional sports than we young nerds might recognize the concept of the minor league farm team — a place for emerging athletes to demonstrate their talents and hopefully catch the attention of higher-echelon agents and be invited to play in the big leagues for the big bucks. The underground art scene was full of farm teams — big deals in their local area codes, perpetually at risk of having their top talent poached by larger international crews such as the long-standing big three: ACiD Productions, iCE Enterprises, and Creators of Intense Art (CiA). These groups weren’t known for predatory recruitment tactics, but rather for being the natural, inevitable destinations for the underground’s most exceptional creative talent. Most of us didn’t realize it at the time, but the best artists in any crew were usually destined to finish their art scene tenure as members of one of these elite groups—if they stuck around long enough to develop their talent to qualify. You had to keep a close eye on emerging local talent, hoping to catch the next big thing early and persuade them to spend some time in your company before continuing their inevitable rise upward and outward.
Just as we in Mist (Mistigris) served as fodder for more major groups, we received a critical boost by absorbing wholesale the humble local crew "kRAP", filled with whimsical up-and-comers who had grown tired of the administrative burden of running their organization. The talents of kRAP were a much-needed shot in the arm. While Mist’s lit, code, and music divisions were as strong as ever, when the main atraction—ANSI art—was concerned, we, after a year of sharing an area code with the ANSI elites of Integrity, would come looking rather deflated. Integrity artists, many of whom were Mist alumni, could continue to develop their skills under the specialist tutelage of its leader Darkforce, another iMPERiAL graduate (who had come out on the RAiD side of things) without any disruption to their routine of calling local BBSes. There, their work could pass through many hands (e.g., illustrators could hand off their raw pictures for dedicated logoists to frame and adorn) until it was all of a uniform degree of top-notch professional quality, something that was less standard among the developing experimental and anarchic intermedia cross-pollinators of Mist. If you were drawing ANSI art in area code 604 and wanted your work to shine among that of your peers without any distracting works in other mediums or formats diluting the experience, it made perfect sense to join Integrity.
No longer able to rely on the exclusive loyalty of our membership and with control over the underground of our area code 604 domain steadily eroding, we attempted a merger with the distant group Fire Graphics in an attempt to remain credible — a merger which rather quickly dissolved in an expedited repeat of the same mistakes (of tenuous remote communication) that had doomed iMPERiAL. Integrity's dominion of our local art scene didn't last long either, but when it wrapped up, it merged wholesale, upward, into ACiD. From that point on, our former colleagues who had joined Integrity became essentially unreachable.