EPTI came home from a nice and relaxed summer day, just having enjoyed dinner with my parents whom I hadn't seen in at least half a year. As usual I always spend a few minutes on TL to check on some of the few threads I still follow and post in. For some reason it struck me that so many of the other posters are completely anonymous to me. I barely recognize any of the posters from other threads or from before on TL. I started clicking on profiles and saw that all those guys or girls have been on TL at least a couple of years. It reminded me of another guy that used to pop up in every fucking thread like some serial poster, right about the time I registered an account. Mizu or something his name was. I tracked down his profile from the MC fanclub thread (I remember he started that one because at the time I was secretly pissed off that he beat me to it). Hadn't posted since April 2014. He moved on and I'm still here. Both of us already have had a TL account for nearly 5 years. That's almost 1/5th of my entire life. More than half my adult life. But it already started so long before that...
I heard a loud pop. There goes the top...
1999: Vanilla Starcraft
I lived in shitsville in the middle of nowhere. I grew up there. We had a computer with a dial up modem that got disconnected as soon as someone picked up the phone. Many of you will know the pain. My older cousins had introduced me to Starcraft. Being completely ignorant I was only playing offline until they convinced me to join them in the magical world of online gaming. I remember it so well. I was on the phone with my cousin as he was talking me through the process of making an account for battle net. I signed in, pressed OK and heard the soon oh-so familiar sound of metal banging on metal (for lack of a better description). The screen went black and.... Starcraft NLD-1. My new home.
Now me and my cousins were hardcore noobs. All we did was play mucho maps like Top vs Bottom or Fastest (no rush 15 or 20 of course). For those of you who don't know what those maps were like it was pretty much infinite money and pure massing. Like this:
The No rush 15 or 20 meant that you weren't supposed to attack until the timer hit 15 or 20. This meant that by that time most people would have ridiculous production and defences. It was pretty much a coin flip on who had the better army composition (almost everyone just maxed out on one type of unit). Good times. We were having such a good time being noobs together we decided to make a clan. The big clan was born. Yeah just big as in a big size. Especially because big in Dutch means piglet. Those people that cared enough to laugh at us when they realized it wasn't an acronym for something that is badass in the mind of a 14 year old did motivate me to start thinking of a meaning. I never came up with anything. It is my TL namesake though. B.I.G. not a rap reference. No meaning. Just the ego of a 13 year old boy that has been hurting for over 15 years. We had fun with our big clan (that's right its all in small letters). More and more people started switching to Brood War. We tried it but we hated the fact that suddenly every race had a cloaked attack unit (fucking DT and lurker forcing everyone to make detection). So we stuck with Vanilla starcraft doing a three proned zealot rush pretty much every damn game. Zealot rush didn't work? Make more Zealots until you win or die. We lost a lot.
However much fun we had life catches up to people and the big clan fell apart, mostly due to real life responsibilities or people simply losing interest in the game. Only I remained. It was the start of my solo career. I never seriously rejoined a clan after that so I guess big clan will always be the one true clan for me <3.
2000 ~ 2001: Replays
I had just started secondary school (in the Netherlands everyone does at around the age of 12) going from a small village school of around 500 people to a "big city" school with easily 5000 people. Just like everyone else at that age it was a bit of a struggle to fit in. It wasn't as hard on me as it was for some kids but switching from a small village to a big city required some rough adjustments that took me some time to get used to. Battle net was some kind of haven I suppose. A good way to get your mind off things. The end of the big clan meant I needed to find different maps and teams on battle net to spend time with. I still remember playing 3v3 at hunters, 2v2 at temple, custom maps like turret defense and evolves, and most of all hanging out in NLD-1 (hanging out in chat channels was really popular for some reason) with people like liquid`nazgul (who never said a word), the guys from [Hi~!] (shoutout to Shaol!ng), voodoo., 2b., .pr., EK., Slayer-1st, firestream_m and many more that I'm forgetting now. Around this time replays became a thing and with that my understanding of the game grew by learning about guys like boxer and nada. Those days were probably the most awesome online gaming days I have had to date. But as always good things come to an end. Regions were introduced and suddenly all the players in the world were divided. People started migrating to U.S. East because that was supposedly the place to be if you were any half decent player. In a way I guess this was somehow "the beginning of the end" for Starcraft 1 because a divide was created between casuals and more serious players. As we all know only the latter remained. Since my friend list started becoming just as vacated as NLD-1 I logged in less and less. Until Diablo 2 got released ofcourse.
I'm tired so I'll finish the rest some other time.
