Once upon a time, there was a young man named Stephen Granade. Now, Stephen fancied himself a writer, and he was intrigued by this new-fangled thing they called "the Internet." He was also interested in text adventures, and had been for years. He'd been known to read the Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction since the early 1990s.
He decided to create a few pages for text adventure authors. And that went over nicely. Occasionally people would write him and thank him for making those pages. And Stephen was pleased.
Then one day, a strange man emailed Stephen and said how much he liked Stephen's pages about interactive fiction. Would he be interested in writing similar pages for a company, and in being paid to do so?
Now, Stephen was a bright young lad. "I like writing," he said to himself. "I bet I would like writing for money even more!" So he decided to try writing for the company.
The company found this arrangement agreeable, and Stephen began creating pages for the company. Now the rest of the acts of Stephen with this company, and the details thereof, are they not written in the book of the history of Brass Lantern?
But as the years passed, Stephen became less and less enchanted with his pages at the company. To create revenue, the company added more and more ads to the pages. Pop-up windows descended on his site like a plague of locusts, and soon his pages were loaded down with many adornments, so many that it became hard to distinguish Stephen's writings from the noise of the bazaar.
"This is not good," said Stephen. "But I still enjoy writing, and I do not know if I could create such a site on my own." And so Stephen continued to create pages for the company.
Now it came to pass in the days that followed that a famine came upon the Internet companies. The company that Stephen worked for was not spared the crushing hand of Adam Smith. And so the company decided that it didn't need quite so many people writing for them, and closed a number of its sites, including the one Stephen worked on.
But Stephen, being a bright and industrious lad, as has been previously mentioned, decided that he could run such a web site by himself. In addition to being bright and industrious, he was also a bit egotistical, and thought that his writings were of such value that they should not pass from the face of the Earth.
And so Stephen created Brass Lantern. Its goals were threefold:
Stephen decided that those goals in that order were the proper focus of his new site. And so it was that he created Brass Lantern and opened its doors on the 29th of October, 2001.