EPTI'm quite bored this friday night so I decided that I want to put out my life into text-entered form.
Disclaimer: Don't read this if you're not interested mainly I'm posting this so I can read back on this in the near or far future.
When I look back on my life I can only remember the important events as most people can so that is what I will mainly talk about.
I have lived in a nice neighborhood in Calgary, AB, Canada (same house too) all my life and on my personality it really shows that I haven't been through much hardship to speak of. I have played games ever since my much older sister Jasmine gave me her original hand-held Donkey-Kong and then after that her original gameboy.
Those two things shaped me as a person for the rest of my life and I am just now beginning to realize how much of a gigantic impact she really had on my life. She was the one who really started me into gaming and she kept on reinforcing my passion for them. I then got my own gameboy pocket along with wario world and pokemon blue a while later. Pokemon and RPGs became an obsession of mine for years and years and I didn't even know that the RTS genre existed until I first downloaded the age of empires demo edition years later.
Now back to the gameboy pocket.
That was my first system that I owned and I got it around my 5th birthday or so (though I'm not 100% sure on which it was). Now like I was saying before I played a crap done of pokemon blue version for years and years until I eventually got new games. Now in pokemon I was one of those kids that had to restart every week or so just so I didn't get bored. Looking back on it I am ashamed that I never collected all 150 originals seeing as how much time I put into it. But honestly did anyone really collect all 150 pokemon legitimately? I haven't met anyone that has.
A while after I got my gameboy I then got my nintendo 64 along with my entire family getting our first mainstream desktop computer that I then used nearly all day every day (I say mainstream because my dad had an old one from the 1980s or so that I used to play the game alley cat on floppy disc). While I was busy playing my nintendo 64, it was around the time that Starwars: The phantom menace was coming out and I was totally into it (I mean I had gone to the theaters to see the starwars movies that had been "remastered" and watched them each dozens of times on video tape). I had then been gifted the starwars podracing game and the phantom menace game both for pc from my parents and that (along with lego island and lode runner) was really what got me interested in PC gaming.
So after I played the shit out of those games I then wandered off into the vast land of the internet where I learned of something called a "demo". I saw it as getting free games and not having to save up all of my chore money for months just so I could play a new game. So the very first demo I played was Age of Empires (the original) and it was my first RTS experience ever. I must have played that demo for a year before I moved on. I played with my friend that would come over and play on his computer over LAN. Of course we would play with cheats and with fog of war off so it was completely ridiculous but we treated it as whoever won was the better man for that day.
After that amazing year of RTS was over I was going into around grade 2 or so (didn't mention but I'm 18 at the moment) when I discovered a demo of a game called Starcraft. Now I'm not sure how many of you played the demo but you could play for free over battle.net but you could only play the Terran race. I played that demo for a year just like age of empires until I was in grade 3 and I finally saved enough money to buy the full version of starcraft.
Now only knowing about one match up from online experiences the full version was a whole new playground to get onto and I was extremely excited to finally be able to play Protoss and Zerg. I was so excited to get home from the store because I liked how Zerg looked and sounded so much. I then loaded it up and installed it and my heart was smashed to pieces when I saw the words over the zerg campaign that read "must complete campaign 1 first". I cried when I found that out that day and I will never forget it. (Like 5 years later I figured out that I could just click on it and press continue on anyways)
So as honorable as a man I was I vowed that I would not cheat and I beat that campaign and was so proud of myself after i did. So after beating the campaign around a month after I bought the game (battle.net was too scary of a place now that I knew that there were people who have been playing the other races for years longer than me) I could finally play the zerg race. I was so happy that I just played that campaign with my friend sitting behind me watching the whole time and we both had gigantic grins on our faces.
So flash forward around a year and I am now just about to finish grade 4. My friend (whom is also named Chris) and I (my name is Chris if you hadn't figured that out by that last statement) had just recently started playing with each other over battle.net under some questionable (now that I look back at it) handles. Since we were both in the same class I was known as "Chris K" and he was known as "Chris C". Since we were such good friends I decided to name myself "focc" (stands for "friend of chris c") and he decided to name himself "commander_foc" because even back then we knew that "fock" would have been a bad word to say and we were both honorable gentlemen that always listened to their parents and never swore.
Me and him played each other in 1v1 matches what must have been 200 games without playing anyone else and we were now prepared to face other people in the epic battles that were 2v2 games.
Now we had no idea what a "ladder" system was even though I had previously played Diablo 2 with him also. So we just looked for a game that was titled something like "new players only" and we both joined and went on a team together and were extremely excited. Now I was still playing zerg at this time and I believe he was too. We had no concept of strategy and we pretty much said things to eachother like "OK CHRIS ILL GO FOR LOTS OF HYDRALISKS AND YOU CAN GO FOR ULTRALISKS AND WE WILL CATCH THEM OFFGUARD". Needless to say our 1 base hydralisk and ultralisk attack didn't work so well when we both had about 9 workers and 3 hydras and 1 ultra something like 12 minutes into the game. We got completely smashed and after few hundred 1v1 and 2v2 games more we quickly learned about a style of game called a "use map settings" game. We literally played 7v1 super hard computer hundreds of times with the odd helms deep and penguin wars game mixed into it.
I played Starcraft almost exclusively until about December 2006 (in grade 8) when I learned about a game called "world of warcraft". Now I installed the trial version on Christmas 2006 and played it all day every day that Christmas vacation.
So after I started playing WoW everything in life and games just became a routine to me. I went to school, got home, played WoW, and then went to bed. I did this every day until in 2010 I heard that my all-time favourite game Starcraft had a sequel going into beta. I wasn't too excited at first since I heard about all the rallying behind this matchmaking system and how I would want to play more 1v1 against real people. To me this was just another use map settings playground with better graphics.
I then found someone named HuskyStarcraft who introduced me to something called "progaming" and that people could actually live the dream that I had for years that was playing games for a living and making money at it. I never played in the beta even though I watched every game that Husky uploaded for months.
So in July 2010 when SC2 got released I was on vacation in Summerland, BC when I decided that I would go to Kelowna with my family for the day but instead of going shopping I was going to go to the Switchbox gaming cafe that they had across from the mall. This place was packed with people playing starcraft and I was excited to be around all of them. I payed my money, loaded up a game, and started playing a game in the practice league. I played protoss in my first game because I had seen someone use a unit called the stalker and that they could teleport up and down cliffs. So in Starcraft 2 I opened up with my basic starcraft 1 opening where I made around 14 probes for the whole game then proceeded to steal their gas. So I had done some research (in the tech tree in-game) and saw that stalkers had their upgrades come from the twilight council so I built one of those right when my cybernetics core was finished and then I upgraded blink right away. So around 16 minutes in the game I moves out with my 6 stalkers that had blink and I wanted to do what the people I saw in that video do which was blinking into their base and killing all of their buildings. So I ran up to his cliff on what I think was Delta Quadrant and I Blinked against the wall and was wondering why I couldn't go up and I thought it was a glitch. I waited for the blink cool down to finish and then I noticed that I was being hit by something and it killed all of my 6 stalkers and then I left the game. (I came to know them as the terrors that are marauders).
So I was going into grade 12 (big jump I know) when I started out in September in the Bronze league. I kept on playing Protoss (and still haven't stopped!) and playing the one strategy that I searched up on ChaCha (or something like that). This strategy revolved around me getting out a stargate insanely fast so I can get void rays very quickly (this was around the time I discovered Day[9] who is the superhero in my life). I literally did nothing but that strategy until November when I realized that it lost too much against ground rushes and people who make turrets and queens and stalkers. Then I saw Husky's video about a strategy called the 4 warp gate push which I then "fixed" and worked in a cannon rush into it (i know lol). I kept on playing until I realized that it was going nowhere until I learned how to make a colossus and learned what expanding and macro was.
So after I worked on those things around a month before season 1 ended I got promoted to silver and then quickly after to gold. Right after the ladder unlocked I kept working very hard on my colossus macro strategy until I hit platinum in season 2. I then stayed platinum until season 3 or 4 and then here I am finally Diamond (but pushing to become masters hopefully). Around the time of September 2011 I was just starting computer science (because I really wanted to be in the gaming industry and decided this was the best option around grade 7). I then proceeded to fail a class and drop out of another class by october just because of the sheer amount of games that I was playing at the time.
To save my parents some money and to save me some time I dropped out of university after my first semester was over and started looking for a job.
So here I am now! Unemployed 18 year old university dropout staying up till 6 am every day playing Starcraft with the dreams of going pro one day. I always tell myself that no matter what people tell me I can always do anything I put my mind to whether it takes one week or ten years I can do whatever I want. I spend the days looking for jobs (which seem to be rare to even find a posting for in my case) and the nights prepairing for what I hope to do sometime in the future.
Thanks for reading (if you actually got this far which I doubt anyone will)
I hope you enjoyed reading my gaming life as much as I enjoyed remembering it all and typing it all out. I would love to hear what everyone thinks about my life and it's choices as I love to hear differing perspectives.
Thanks and have an amazing day ^_^
