EPTI'm your stereotypical Chinese-American college student. I mean, you can pretty much guess half of my interests and characteristics already. Gets good grades, Wins math contests, plays DDR, played piano/violin, wears glasses... nothing terribly interesting really.
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I first discovered StarCraft back in 6th grade, which was 2000. I still remember the first game my friend showed me. terran and 7 zergs on FFA on the map Homeworld. I was absolutely fascinated by the game as he was trying to explain what to me how firebats were good against zerg and how missile turrets could shoot down overlords.
I got the battle chest for Christmas for $35, which was a pretty good deal, considering it even came with strategy guides. Being Asian meant that my parents would severely limit the amount of StarCraft that I would be allowed to play to at most two-three hours a week. That meant I read through both strategy guides before really playing. My first game involved playing terran against 7 zergs; they didn't have the ffa option in the 1.00 version that I installed. I lost miserably.
I quickly made my way to bnet, where I registered under the name "regis2000". This was the days before FMP and 0Clutter, with the classic maps such as Green Hunters or Blue Night in Seoul. Needless to say, I was horrible and got destroyed every game.
Eventually, one of my friends showed me UMS for the first time, and I remember being amazed by games such as Evolves, Protect the Queen, Lurker Defense, and MTG. I made another account under "ds-h" and quickly forgot about melee.
For the next several years, I would play mostly UMS and some fastest/BGH, and got pretty damn good at them too. Yet I would get bored after a while and even played a few other games during the time: Empire Earth, Tribes 2, Simcity 3000, Warcraft III, Civilization 4, but would invariably come back to StarCraft. One time I got into a fastest clan and played there for a week before I got seriously bored of winning.
Then one day, I don't remember exactly when, I discovered SC Legacy's Pimpest Plays section and sometime later, Team Liquid. I started watching famous replays but really didn't get into progaming until last summer. I think I have Manifesto7's battle reports to thank for that. Eventually I started playing more and more melee, and I didn't even realize how terrible I was at first. If I remember correctly, my first post on TL was actually in one of evanthebouncy's story threads. I found out thedeadhaji went to the same college as I did, and I slowly learned the ropes of 1v1 StarCraft.
In the process, I started playing more, watching more games (especially live), and posting more.. I became a fanboy of sAviOr, and so this quickly became my biggest hobby. I even got a lot of my college friends to start playing again (9 at last count).
It also helped contribute to my massively lower GPA spring semester compared to fall semester, but that's a different story.
For now, I'm taking a break from serious playing, but I do stay up to watch all of Ma Jae-yoon's games
