EPTI am not the best writer and/or english speaker so please excuse my errors. So if you don't like long storys by swiss people who you don't know, I added my new song at the bottom that has nothing to do with gaming.
I play computer and video games for almost too long. My fascination started at an age I can't even remember. I played a lot of Pokemon on my big-ass game boy and also played through Super Mario Bros. and stuff like that. Unfortunately, my memory system works way too selective and I don't remember a lot. I remember almost everything from my hardcore gaming times though, which started when I was around 12 y/o. My parents didn't like that, especially my mother. She feared the electro magnetic fields I put myself into almost every day and bought special "monitor covers" for our CRT which darkened the view but "were better for my eyes".
Almost everybody has stories like that, especially the people that read this. Those stories are precious memories that make us smile a lot. When I think back to my PS2 times, to the countless hours I spent in Final Fantasy & Metal Gear Solid, challenging one of my classmates to finish it before I do or to get the better gear for Luna, I seriously can't stop smiling. After those times we even started a clan. It was called Team-RES!STANCE and we started because of the release of Battlefield 1942. We loved this game. We still do.
We were two members, called ourselves "leaders", I made a flash website with Swift3D and we started recruiting. We found some new members in the area and some new ones on public servers. Our ingame tag was [reS!] and if someone new joined and we weren't sure yet if he fits the team, he got the tag [reS?]. I actually still think that was kind of smart. Anyway.
So after some time we had 9-12 active team members and I already updated the site with a forum and other fancy stuff like cool member lists. I really liked doing that shit.
We played a lot and started practicing for some clanwars, got better and played more clanwars, joined ESL and so on, and so forth. We also had some meet ups and went to LAN parties and stuff, all that here in Switzerland. I kept working on our website and finally made one with PHPKit, kind of a big CMS back then. We started getting bigger and we even got some recognition because we started to get really good. Until some guys came and stole 6 players from our team with some kind of "better" offer. Well, that was a setback. We trained these people, tried to treat them fair and we always had fun together. We could have given in back then. We were only about 6 people left, which wasn't enough for a team and we didn't think we could find equally skilled players. But we tried.
And we found them. We practiced, showed them our tricks and made it back to ESL. We played against the team that stole our players and lost. We practiced harder. We still lost. We won a lot of other games and climbed up the ladder in ESL. We played again against that team, and we lost again. Then we hacked their forum. Well... we didn't really hack it, nobody knew how to do stuff like that, but we got a quick look into their internal forums. And we learned that some of them were cheating against us. So we stopped worrying and just let them be. We then proceeded to win against highly decorated teams from Germany, reached rank 11 out of 180 teams and even got to play against mousesports back then. They crushed us, but I mean, I was like 15 years old then. It felt good to get crusehd by mouz.
Well, our team grew bigger from this moment on, in top times we had over 60 members in our team and we went "eSports". We played CS, WarCraft 3, Battlefield: Vietnam, Battlefield 2 when it came out, CS:S and some other games. We even had a paintball squad. It was fun, and stressful. I started to play WarCraft 3, then Counter Strike Source and then I stopped playing in leagues and ladders and just played for fun. And that’s kinda my „competetive story“. Most of our members stopped playing from there on and at some point, Team-RES!STANCE was gone. Or not.
So, that era of my life seemed over. But all of this teached me a lot of things. It teached me to not surrender if someone screws you over. It teached me to have faith in myself and that I can get really good at something if I really want to. And I learned that there is nothing more important than friendship.
You know, I didn‘t have a lot of real friends when I was 13 years old. I didn’t even know what „real friend“ means. When I started our team my goal was to play a lot and get good at it. It wasn’t to make friends. I didn’t really care for that. And I didn’t care for building websites, I just did the first one so my members had a place to „be“ or feel cool about.
Now, all my closest friends are those people I met back then. I see them almost everyday. We’re renting a small room to play games, watch movies, talk and drink far away from daily routine. We are now around 10 almost grown up (depends on how you define grown-up) men from different social backgrounds, origins and lifestyles that all respect one another and tell each other to shut the fuck up and accusing everyone of having a small penis. I would have met almost NONE of those guys if I wouldn’t have played games. I even live together with three of them right now. Alright, one is my brother, but it still counts because gaming bound us together. Oh and, I am a professional web designer now and I fuckin‘ love my job.
So everyone. That’s why I love gaming and always will. It's pretty simple.
My new song (nothing about gaming, more SC2/gaming songs will follow though):
My channel (Mostly StarCraft/Gaming songs, newest one isn't though):
http://www.youtube.com/user/blAkeMusic4Life
Thanks!
