Our quakelive dueler ZLR linked me to this article, ill include the link at the bottom of the blog here but i thought instead of just linking it on facebook id give a bit of history. Its just a bit of a ramble about where i started in gaming and why i started in gaming and how i got to the position i am in today.
Okay so back in 1996 i was fresh out of high school and looking at what to do with my life. I had always wanted to be a carpenter or cabinetmaker but as im sure my teachers would attest i was literally the WORST at woodworking. It was something of a blow to me as i really wanted to do that but fate had other adventures for me.
I grew up on a little hobby farm literally in the middle of nowhere, i had ventured with my dad to an army disposals store and dug up something i wanted to tinker with. We had only just started using computers in schools back then and while i didnt have much money i managed to buy an appleIII for $20. This machine was a bit of a token gesture in the PC world, in fact it seemed so rare that to get any games on it i had to find someone in the US who even had one.
So this was abandoned and instead i spent my time trying to recode this without much success. This lead into my high school days where computers still didnt excite me much either, i was a bit of a know it all and i found the classes on how to type word documents boring and easy. The irony was that i failed computers, not because i didnt know how i just didnt do the work that was asked of me, i was too busy making midi sound clips while everyone else was writing word documents. I was still determined to be a carpenter at this stage but as i came to the close of my high school days things were about to change.
I walked into safeway and talked to the store manager and within about 10 minutes i was offered a job. I worked pretty hard and did some pretty epic overtime so i was bringing in a decent wage for back in those days. It was for some unknown reason i decided to get a computer, i went down to melbourne in my car and $3000 later i had a pentium 166. It was at this stage that i started to notice that computers didnt really challenge me, i would take the case off pull it apart and put it back together and it wasnt difficult. I didnt worry i would break it because there is something about computers where i look at them and they just made sense.
I was soon on the internet with my 33.6 modem and when i joined the local internet provider which was run by the local paper i got to know the network admin who ran the service. Back then an ISP was powered by 4 64k ISDN internet connections, real powerful stuff. So i soon learned that the network admin from that newspaper played this game called quake. I soon went out and bought that and i started playing, one of the first things i learned was +mlook it was revolutionary to me as a guy who played wolfenstein and duke nukem that i would run around aiming with my mouse, it wasnt moving me around the screen it was moving my crosshair.
From there i spent hours playing each night against other local users, i graduated to 56k v2 modem technology and i felt like a "lpb" or low ping bastard as they were called in the day. I was getting a 90 ping on my ISP's server which was very rare back then and i really was starting to take the game serious dueling other people. My most memorable moment was dueling a quake player called reload, this guy was meant to be the king of dueling, although i think history may say differently now as i havent heard the name since. He thrashed me 22-2 and i got a glimpse at the world of proper comp gaming.
I progressed through till i heard about some mod called team fortress, this was my golden day where i spent years playing that game in matches on "ozemail" who dont even exist anymore and was well before gamearena. So i found the first true FPS and the first strategy based team game in quake and i think like most in the world who played those games we were starting to see esports emerge as a word. It was in those days that rocketjumping was born, bunnny hopping and strafe jumping was born and many other strats that you almost see now in modern FPS games the only difference being the maps and games played. Split strats or hard strats they all existed back then and i wish for the most part that the younger generation had got to experience that.
So thats how i connected to this article and for you old timers i think you will also completely understand. From there i progressed after a long exodus from gaming, to return to a bit of counterstrike, day of defeat, then on to battlefield 2. I dont play comp games anymore short of the odd scrim with my fellow team mates but this article took me right back 15 years to those days when 150 ping was good and everyone were mates.
Have a read of this and learn a bit more about the true history of esports and the emergence of FPS games.
Article here: Why Quake Changed Games Forever
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