Quote: "Anyway does anyone have any other possible reasons for the forums being called apollo."
How about the real reason?
Before I joined TGC (or Darkbasic Software as they were called back then), I ran a company called t-minus 10. One of our clients was
Aardman Animations - the film studio that do Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, etc. We built a forum system for their web site, along with loads of other parts (news feeds, film comments, etc). Internally, the project was known as Apollo, and went through several iterations on their site. Originally it was coded in C# (ASP.NET platform) (yes, I used to be a Microsoft Certified Engineer / Developer, even though I still did all of the core company PHP work as well).
I eventually built the TGC forum in PHP4, but as I'd always liked the name of the Aardman system, I kept it.
It'd be nice if it really did come from a pinball machine. But alas no.
Bite my shiny metal ass