The Galant Center was born from the old Mitsubishi Usenet newsgroup, alt.autos.mitsubishi - you can probably still find it using a newsreader like Outlook Express. Anyhow, three guys, Rich(BGR), Mohammed(Mochanges), and Arnulfo(TOC or TheOneCameleon), would share info on their new Mitsubishi Galants, which would later be referred to as the 8G, for 8th Generation. Up until this time, I knew of no other site dedicated strictly to the Galant. I believe there was a DSM site, and other Mitsubishi sites, but nothing like TGC. Mochanges was the first person that I knew of that cleared the front headlights, using some needlenose pliers and other tools. Me, I came up with the idea of taking apart the stock airbox and flipping upside down so that you could have an open air ram intake. (I later discovered that the 3G Eclipse Spyder strut tower bar fit our cars, too). Arnulfo did something crazy like removing his CAT and getting a different CAM gear to increase his HP in his I4.
The newsgroup seem very ineffective in regards to posting information for our cars, so I volunteered to start up a Yahoo club site - BigRich's 2K Galant Center. That site is still available, but is littered with spam. I launched that site on 12.08.99. This was the start of what would later become known as The Galant Center, which I felt should be a place for all generation Galants to come together - hence the moniker, Home of the Mitsubishi Galant. At that same time, a sister club, known as Club3G was building momentum on the Yahoo club website as well, and eventually branched out to become it's own internet website called Club3G.org. Club3G was bringing in about 3 to 5 new members on their club site for every 1 new member on our Yahoo site. {{I was keeping track}}
One thing that I took pride in was that I would stay up for countless hours searching the Internet for anything pertaining to the Galant. Anything I could find, I would post up on the club site so that if someone "new" was to come along and have questions that probably already were asked, they only needed to look at one place for the answer, TGC. I came across several sites in Asia and eventually over time, I started seeing other Galants being posted on car sites (I forgot the name but it was similar to Cardomain.com)** it was called Speedoption.com - now defunt **. I then actively "recruited" every Galant owner I came across on the internet and in person, by leaving a TGC card on their door or window. Many other pioneers made it to TGC on their own and shared their knowledge, like Reelax. He was the first person I know of that had JDM head and taillights on his US 8G - but the man cut his springs (I think he had H&R springs?)! He did all this prior to coming to TGC.
Through all of this, the ball was now rolling and picking up steam and we were getting too large for the Yahoo group. I took it upon myself to finance hosting the site on various webhosts until eventually it became too large for one person to handle. Thanks to many generous members and vendors, they donated funds to keep TGC afloat, but eventually, this was still not enough as we were eating up too much bandwidth. I eventually let Burthold host TGC on his server at home, until something unfortunate happened. TGC now resides in the hands of VegasMatt and Proto. There's a lot of other stuff to tell, but it's like 01:48 in the morning... I hate to drop a few names like I did above and not show respect to all the other pioneers on TGC, but I've been away too long from TGC to remember everyone's names (excluding the moderators - I know most of you guys - either met in person or talked on the phone).
-BGR