(Revised and updated to include things we've remembered happening since we wrote the last version of the history)
For 9 years, MikkyX had been a gamer, striving for the best scores and the fastest times. Veteran was much the same, and he felt pretty unbeatable at Soul Calibur. So it was decided that we'd set up a site on which to advertise this fact.
Fastercast was written in Perl and didn't use a database. Launching in March 2000, data was read to and from flat files, and you didn't need to register. Soul Calibur was the first game on there before it was joined by time trials for Sonic Adventure, Sega Rally 2, and Tokyo Highway Challenge. The principle was the same - submit your time and see it appear straight away.
Sadly, Fastercast (it even had a rotten name) was never a great success and lasted, if Google Groups is anything to go by, less than a month.
While playing Mario Kart: Super Circuit little over 18 months later, the inspiration hit to do it all again. Using recently garnered PHP knowledge, the GBAList was prepared and launched on November 5th. A tiny database powered the site, which launched with MK:SC and later was meant to get Advance Wars added.