THE STORY SO FAR

Bringing CubeBomb back.

CubeBomb was a place to make a cubebombian your own, collect items, and spend time with friends. Bringing it back has meant piecing together both the site and the history around it. The r/Cubebomb community preserves some of that history through members’ memories, development updates, and conversations with its creator, Taylor Swanson, known as u/StuffMaker.

One post became an important starting point: StuffMaker’s announcement releasing the V2 source. The code came from an unfinished rewrite begun around 2013–2014. I never obtained the source for the earlier live site, so I had to work back through Taylor’s commits to understand how the pieces fit. It felt like reconstructing a book from individual pages, with parts of the story still missing.

Those gaps showed up throughout the project. The shop had sample names and prices, with previews pointing to images on the former website. The friend-list code was unfinished, and the item-transfer and preview tools depended on files and databases from the original server. The source offered clues about how things worked, but bringing those features back required rebuilding what they depended on.

The avatar was one of the biggest hands-on jobs. Some complete images and testing templates survived, but the full item collection and its separate wearable layers did not. I recreated the cubebombian from scratch, using the surviving artwork to match its shape, proportions, and familiar look as closely as I could. That work became the foundation for new clothing, faces, hats, and backgrounds to mix and match, alongside the preserved logo, cloud background, and original illustrations.

Making that familiar character part of a working community also meant rebuilding the systems behind it. Accounts now use new authentication for registration, sign-in, email verification, and password recovery. Authorization was rebuilt too: the rules that control what members can view or change, protect private messages, and give moderators the access they need. The new forum runs on NodeBB and connects to the same CubeBomb sign-in, while the shop, inventory, profiles, and messaging have needed new work to bring them together.

There are still things the surviving source cannot give back. Without the original community database, historical accounts, posts, messages, friendships, balances, and inventories have not been restored. The artwork alone cannot tell us who owned an item or what it originally cost. Any demo members or conversations are fictional examples, separate from new accounts and activity created here.

The aim is to give CubeBomb a future that still feels connected to its past: familiar characters, room to create, and a place to meet again. The surviving code, artwork, and community memories have made that work possible, one piece at a time.

Credits

Original CubeBomb code and artwork by Taylor Swanson, also known as StuffMaker, used under CC BY 4.0. NodeBB and other dependencies retain their own licenses.