Contact
Lifestream
I’m feeling nostalgic. What a horrid emotion, as if the present doesn’t provide enough obstacles to overcome and constructs to fight.
One thing that usually comes drifting back is my experience in online first person gaming. Namely with Quake 1. Something I usually don’t talk about. It’s too bad since I was quite good at it, or so I would like to think.
Of course, those were different times. Everything was so much simpler back then. For one, few people played online. Broadband was unheard of. God knows how much money went to modem fees and straight into some telecom company. But the point is that those that played were dedicated and genuinely interested in playing for the fun of it. There was no such thing as “e-sports” and clans were generally a pleasant and loosely organized group. In short it was fun. Before it all went down the drain.
I was a member of the now defunct Clan Lagitus and went by the alias “Reaper” or the “The_Reaper.LagPf” to be more exact. Or something like that. There seems to be very little info on the net about the clan though. It was a modem-only club and probably one of the largest clans back then or indeed ever. With over 100 members, manpower had to make up for being a bit latency challenged.
It’s too bad I don’t have much data left from those days in terms of screenshots and recordings. I wasn’t as meticulous back then. Almost all that remains is a badly compressed in-game shot of a classic DM3 (I think?) clash with some of the best in the field. I still remember that Quakeworld ranking system. Didn’t work out too well, something about the weighting system. Must have been back in 1996 or 1997.
And that is also probably the last time I played online games seriously, except for that brief encounter with Planetside beta two years ago. Ahhh, nostalgia. Hmmm. I’ll get back to this when I have something more to say.
