Part 1: July 2003 - March 2004
I suppose the point where it all began was during the summer of my junior year of high school. I had been looking for a summer job and my mom suggested I go to CompUSA to apply for a job there. So one afternoon in July I drove to the store in Manchester to get an application. After about 15 minutes of waiting for the woman at the customer service desk to find the application form I finally received one and then decided to browse around a bit and see if they had anything on sale. I was walking through the area of the computer games section I had become so familiar with over the past 3 years, when I saw something lying on the bottom shelf in the "bargain area". It was a box proclaiming it contained not one but 4 games in one package. It was covered with stickers indicating it had been marked down several times to its current price of $8.99. Upon further inspection I noticed it contained one game that had gotten good reviews in my latest copy of PCGamer magazine, a game I gladly would have paid $8.99 for by itself. However this box had 3 more game in addition to this one so without a moment’s hesitation I grabbed it and five minutes later I was outside congratulating myself on being such a savvy consumer.
When I got home I installed the game I had purchased it for: a superhero game called "Freedom Force" that had gotten an editor’s choice award in PCG. After about an hour of villain smashing I decided to inspect the other games that had come with it. The first one I pulled out was a racing game: one of the "Need for Speed" titles I had never had any interest in. "Boring" I said tossing it aside and thinking about giving it to Adamo since he was the only one I knew who liked that kind of crap. The second one was a first-person-shooter type game that I had heard of before. It was an adaptation of a real-time strategy game in the command and conquer series. I installed that next and played it for a little while before getting bored again and going down stairs to find something to eat and to call Nate and see what he was up to. A short while later Nate was on his way over and I decided to pull out the last game in the box. It was something I had seen an ad for in my PCGamer magazine but was never really interested in. The game was called "Earth and Beyond" and it announced it was a Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG for short) that was based in the distant future where everyone gets a free spaceship somehow. Anyway I had never been really interested in playing one of these games, especially since it required a monthly subscription of $12.99 (big bucks in those days) to play. But because it came with the first 30 days free, and because I had only paid about $2.25 for it I figured, what the hell. I installed the game and it told me I needed a credit card, damn, I didn’t have one yet. I went downstairs and after only about 20 minutes of lobbying my dad relinquished his. So I was up and running, I entered the number and selected a server; Pegasus, and created my first character; Golan, the Progen warrior. I poked around in the tutorial zone for about 5 minutes where I learned how to use the chat box and that was about it. I finally warped into the newbie zone where I tried in vain for about 20 minutes to figure out how to shoot things and finally got bored and quit. So that was my first MMORPG experience, unimpressive at best.
A short while later Nate came over, with David and Adamo arriving a few minutes after. After showing them the new games I had just bought we retired to the basement for a few games of Super Smash Brothers. After bragging about having gotten such a great deal on my box o’ cheapware, David, in a jealous rage, challenged me to a bet: if he won the next game of smash I would burn him copies of the games, and if I won he would have to go buy them himself. Now being the undisputed champion of smash (except when adamo uses his stupid camping tactics which we all agree are just cheap) I accepted the bet and we started the game. After about 15 minutes of carnage later while David and I were arguing over the terms of the bet Nate somehow got the upper hand and managed to beat both of us. Having not planned for this event (because it had never happened before) we decided to call off the bet.
(to be continued)....
