EPTOnce you're about 20 years old, you really start thinking about where your life is going and how okay you are with its direction.
Well, not really, but when you're sitting at your desk in a poorly air conditioned dorm room, unable to sleep because it's literally hotter inside than it is outside, your mind tends to wander.
If someone asked me to point to the one point in my life that brought me to where I am as of this moment, I could. Sadly, it isn't anything quite as magical as the day I bought BW, but I think there's something to appreciate about that moment either way.
You see, back in 4th grade (2000), my school's library gave a catalog to all the students that listed a bunch of books, videos, and educational software that they could order, if they could convince their parents. I, like any other nerd youngling, loved reading, but what really caught my eye in that catalog was a cool looking program published by Interplay called Learn to Program: BASIC. Sure, programming seems like a weird interest for a 10 year old, but the combination of my dad working at Intel and my youthful fascination with indie computer games (does anyone remember the Exile series by Spiderweb Software?) made that little software bundle seem like it was made for me.
Surprisingly, it didn't take too much cajoling to get my parents to order it for me, but I think it's because my dad started to get visions of me following in his footsteps as a programmer. Remember, this was during the dot-com bust, but computers were still a pretty fertile industry. Anyway, a few short weeks later, my faded purple CD arrived in the mail.
I'd like to say I was just a child prodigy and took to programming right away, but alas, I was merely okay at it. Actually, I don't know, since I didn't really have anyone to compare myself to. The lessons in Learn to Program: BASIC were mainly geared towards game production, which was my eventual goal. This made me work even harder at learning how to program, because, as I'm sure you all know, it's a long way from "Hello, world!" to Pong.
However, after a year of improvement, a friend and I sat down for a few weekends in 2001 on our Windows 98s (because ME sucked) and wrote our first game, which I fondly remember as "Lunchroom Combat." It wasn't really a game in the sense that there was a story or anything, but we managed to program in a user controlled character and an AI who had a food fight from opposite sides of an uncrossable lunch table. LTP BASIC was not equipped with a powerful version of BASIC, so the best we could manage with our 11 year old math skills and an amalgamation of raycasting code we found in the example files of LTP BASIC was something that looked like a really, really crappy version of Wolfenstein.
Either way, though, we were proud of ourselves, and that's really all that counted. None of our classmates cared, of course, but being nerds, we were used to that sort of thing. Our parents were supportive, though, which is what really helped us flourish. Over the span of 5th grade, we sunk hours upon hours into programming, just honing our skills by making clones of Snake, Pong, Space Invaders. None of them were particularly good, but we were having fun, and isn't that what being a kid is about?
Our programming projects generally involved trying to make copies of video games that we were playing or used to play, which, at the time, pretty much just limited us to RPGs and arcade games. One day at school, however, my friend told me he had just gotten this awesome game and we HAD to try to write something like it.
This game, of course, was Starcraft: Brood War.
As you can imagine, it's impossible for two 11 year olds to clone an RTS game like BW. Even worse is that we still hadn't moved away from BASIC, so there wasn't even a way we could really try. We sort of mucked around in BASIC for the rest of the year, trying to make something happen, but we realized we had hit the ceiling of LTP BASIC and it was far below Starcraft. We weren't too torn up about it, though, because playing Starcraft quickly replaced trying to clone Starcraft in our free time.
Even 20 years from now, when I forget everything about 2002-03, I'll still remember playing Starcraft every day after school with my friend. We were terrible, of course, but it's not like we had anyone to compare ourselves to? We only played 2v1s and 2v2s against the AI at first, but we slowly started playing each other in 1v1s. We never really picked up that we should attack each other before 200/200, so we only had epic battles in the center of the map in which every unit would die except for the DTs and the lurkers. Since we were master turtlers, though, this meant that we'd just have to quit, since we had impenetrable walls of cannons and spores/sunkens in our bases.
Once my family decided to get broadband internet, I started playing on Bnet, which ended up being a lot less mentally scarring than some of the other first time bnet experiences. I jumped straight into 1v1s, so I never had any Day9-like gangkills, but I still got my ass handed to me in ways I had never seen. Being a stupid little kid, I didn't take these opportunities to learn; rather, I moved on to my newest birthday present: Red Alert 2.
Red Alert 2 was really the perfect game for someone like me. Because there wasn't really a competitive scene, strategy development was slow, so strategies were easy to grasp. The game was imbalanced, anyway, so most games revolved around tank numbers. Still, it was fun to play against the AI and mess around with the superweapons and all the cool units, but the novelty of it eventually faded, bringing me back to my first love, Starcraft. I told myself I wanted to get better, so I started doing some research. These were the days of Web 1.0, so a simple google search led to no end of strategies and tactics hosted on Angelfire, Geocities, and whatnot, so I started learning, albeit slowly. I got better and better, but never really became aware of the proscene until high school, where I was too focused on academic competition (Science Bowl?) to spend much time on Starcraft. Still, it was my early days of Starcraft that awoke my competitive spirit, so in a way, I can say I owe my success to Starcraft.
Fast forward a few years to this summer. The night I bought SC2 and started playing it, it was just like being a little kid again, full of a sense of wonder. As some would put it, it was just like playing Pokemon Red for the first time: even though you didn't know what to expect, you knew that this game was going be a huge part of your life for years to come. Playing SC2 brought back memories of being young, programming games because it was fun, and not really having much responsibility.
Which brings me to the point of this blog post. After spending some time in nostalgia-land, I stopped to take a good hard look at my own life. On one hand, I should really appreciate it; I just started my second year of a 7 year medical program in Boston, I manage my time well enough and work hard enough to maintain a good GPA, and I still get enough time to play some SC2 or hang out with my girlfriend at the end of each day. On the other hand, a voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that my life isn't going the direction it should.
Fortunately, that voice in the back of my head doesn't have much bearing on my day to day decisions, but like I said, it's late and way too hot in my room to sleep.
Whatever happened to my passion? When did I become so... jaded?
