The "The best Info" website launched back in September 2008, when rules needed to be written for the weekly quizzes hosted every Friday by the "Pomogu Vam" ("I'll Help You") character in the game *TimeZero*.
In addition to the rules, I also began publishing announcements and results for quizzes and contests from Tz-best (the site was known by that name until February 2010). Some attention was given to quests and city descriptions, though at the time, Best’s primary focus was hosting quizzes and contests.
Project Start
A few months later, it became clear that it was both possible and necessary to add the site to the ranking of TimeZero-related web resources in order to secure some funding for contests (at the time, funds were obtained through in-game mining). Since the administrators did not allow sites hosted on blog platforms into the ranking, tz-best moved to ucoz.com hosting on February 1st.
Another requirement for inclusion in the ranking was having an active forum on the site. The forum actually launched on February 1st; this date is considered the site's birthday.
The Rise and Fall of Contests
Then came a host of contests, promotions, and quizzes. I’ll highlight just a few of the main contents on the site:
- Quizzes (20 weeks) – distribution of bars and grenades for answering questions; held on Fridays in the Oasis portal.
- Shoot Beams of Light (24 weeks) – an event awarding grenades for kills, cave-ins ganking in the mines.
- Crank Out Content (20 weeks) – an event involving the publication of news on the site.
I obtained the coins for contests and events exclusively through mining, since I lacked the funds to invest real money and didn't want to ask the admins for help.
After five months of mining—exhausted and seeing no return on my efforts—I decided to stop running events and contests; I simply didn't have the energy to do it all myself: mining for the prizes and hosting the events, paying out coins to event organizers, and running around the game zones as a town crier to spam announcements about quizzes.
Changing the format
Starting in July 2009, the first quest walkthroughs and guides for *TZ* began to appear on Best. Initially, everything was created by a single person, but later—once funds became available—other authors and users stepped in to help the site by producing guides.
By September, the work began to bear its first fruit in the form of star ratings, as site traffic was growing noticeably. By the end of 2009, Tz-best ranked among the top five projects about this online game according to the TZ internet resource rankings.
Choosing a Path
After the New Year, a problem arose: all the worthwhile quests in *TimeZero* had already been covered on the site, so the project faced a choice—wait weeks for new quests or create walkthroughs for other, offline games. I didn't want to wait, so I chose the latter. At first, things went well; walkthroughs for games like *Arcanum* and *Half-Life 2* appeared, along with a partial guide for *Diablo 2*. The site's audience grew, and even more people discovered *TimeZero*.
However, in February 2010, the admins issued an ultimatum to TZ-Best: either remove all walkthroughs of offline games hosted on the site, or the project would be dropped from the TZ rankings. I tried to explain that there were no topics left for TZ-related articles, that waiting weeks for quests was pointless, and that other games would actually attract more people to play TZ.
Exodus
That didn't achieve much; the site was dropped from the rankings, and from then on, it was known as "The Best Info." Due to some real-life issues I was facing, the "Best" forum shut down, and the project itself went into limbo until October 2010.
I want to thank everyone who stood by Best and helped develop it throughout 2009—namely Izor, Riviera, Racer, True, Starosta, Nikola Tesla, Skapansky, and many other participants. No matter what, I am glad that things turned out exactly the way they did.
Best remains one of the best projects dedicated to TimeZero. And the fact that people still visit it to read walkthroughs and quest guides means it wasn't all for nothing :)
Update:
On August 1, 2020, the game servers were shut down. The official page now displays an epilogue stating that radiation levels in the post-nuclear world spiked off the charts; this instantly killed all the monsters, and subsequently overwhelmed city domes and protective suits—meaning the radiation wiped out all life on the planet, including humans.
In other words, over the course of 16 years, the player count steadily declined; the developers failed to adapt the game to modern standards or bring it to mobile platforms, largely because the staff had been drastically cut—down to just a dozen people or even fewer in the final years (rumor has it that only four people were maintaining the game after the bulk of the development team had left). Rest in peace, TimeZero; perhaps one day you will rise again?
Relocation and change of format
In late 2025, due to the war, the site migrated from a third-level subdomain to a primary domain and returned to its original hosting provider; the language of the content was also switched from Russian to English. Following the transfer of the existing content, guides for new games began to be added.