Yeah, a handful of us are veterans to the roleplay's original concept, myself included.
I actually contributed to a lot of the early lore, though granted, I haven't been very active in the more recent going-ons.
Hence why I'm here for this lovely reboot.

To answer your question, sometime in 2015(or was it 2014?) was when the first shell of this concept came into being. And it was something like this:
-There was a war between gifteds and humans
-Humans are now pretty much endangered/extinct
-Someone died and people got angry and blamed each other
-So now there's two factions, they have names and, um...
-Yeah, you can just have your character be in the wastelands too. So there's that
-Haha-- Join the roleplay plz

I don't think miss Echo realized exactly what she had created at the time or just how far it would go.