The History of MetCoverArt
In August 1998 a dedicated Metallica fan and bootleg trader named Roamer began making cover artwork for her personal collection of bootlegs. Roamer decided to share the covers that she had been creating by posting them on the web for people to print out and use for their bootleg collections. In September 1999, she began uploading her cover art to various hosts, such as Bravenet, Tripod, and Geocities, and linking them from a main site. Requests for cover artwork poured in faster than she could create the covers. This became very difficult for her as well as the people who were making the requests. Other people offered to help make cover art and began emailing their covers to Roamer. This was a great help but eventually became even more frustrating because the donated covers started coming in faster than they could be uploaded and Roamer's email inbox started running out of space to receive further donated covers. That same month, with her frustration at its highest, Roamer continued her search for a host that would allow others to upload freely and give the person who made the cover artwork credit. Another concern was chronological organization for the cover art so that they could be more easily found.
By April 2001, a more efficient website was desperately needed and Roamer began thinking more and more on how to accomplish such a task. On 7 June 2001 she found the MSN Groups photo gallery hosting and created the community MetCoverArt. She began uploading all of the cover art that had hitherto been collected, which totalled over 150 covers. Many of them were the work of FixxxerJS (also known as Metallica, Inc.), who at one time had hosted a website of his covers called MetArt.Tripod.com. Once the community site was opened, after about a month of uploading covers and creating albums, new uploads started showing up at the site from other artwork creators. In August 2003 several new artists joined MetCoverArt, including Spawn of Cthulhu and Mr.Metal, who would later form part of the MetCoverArt.com staff. The interest in Metallica cover art continued to expand, leading to the creation of a VCD/DVD cover art section at the site on 21 November 2003. The MSN communities site had over 270 registered members before MetCoverArt.com took over in November 2004.
In early 2004, Roamer began a new search for yet another host for the all the cover art. The MSN site simply lacked the storage space that was needed for people to continue to upload their covers without having to re-register a different email and nickname each time a person ran out of storage space. This was very frustating all those wishing to continue uploading cover artwork. The search continued for months, but with no success.
In early August 2004, Spawn of Cthulhu approached Roamer about creating a professional website that would allow free uploading, a PSD gallery, forums, and other multimedia. Roamer welcomed the offer and told him about the frustrations with the MSN community site as well as the search for a new host. He came up with several different solutions before settling on a permanent one that same week. Hosting for such an immense website was found through VisiGod, the administrator of Metpage, whose forum had been the main command center for all the cover artists up to this point. Spawn of Cthulhu then began building the MetCoverArt.com website, and went through two main designs before deciding to base the default graphics on a skin he had originally created when employed under Metallifukinca. Two months passed and finally in November 2004 the site was ready to be cast onto the World Wide Web. Several sections of the website still had yet to be completed, including the cover galleries, and even some of the forum graphics were incomplete.
MetCoverArt is still continuing to grow at a rapid pace, new sections are being added and updated, the forum gains new members everyday, and the cover artists continue to improve their skills and inspire the next generation of cover artists. MetCoverArt always has been and always will be the only website dedicated specifically to Metallica bootleg cover artwork and houses the largest and most complete archive of covers.