The Games That Weren’t is a project I developed for the 2012 NHL lockout, partially as a joke.
As the league began to cancel games, several of the Detroit Red Wings fan bloggers were discussing what they would write about with no hockey. The idea of writing about fake games came up, at which point I realized my experience with simulated hockey through the DetroitHockey.Net Fantasy Hockey League would allow me to simulate all of the games that were cancelled in reality.
I took the codebase I’d created for the DFHL and pulled it into its own site. Because there would be no need for a human general manager / owner for each team, those interaction points were removed and several pages were consolidated.
The home page was updated to feature the game results more prominently, rather than news items (which wouldn’t exist for TGTW).
Finally, the system for actually importing the simulated data was updated to run off of a cronjob rather than a manual process, so that games would be added to the site at the same time each day, rather than whenever I got to it.
The above text and image were copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing. This project launched in October 2012.