My name is Jason Kelley, aka Loophole. When Starcraft was originally released, I had never heard of it. I had never even played Warcraft II or Diablo. My family had owned PC's, but I generally played my games on consoles at the time. I was working at Best Buy in the Home Office section, and a friend of mine was telling me about this game he had picked up. He said he played it for 10 hours straight the day before, and he was trying to describe it to me. I had never played a real time strategy game, and the idea of building up an army from scratch and controlling every aspect of it against an enemy sounded awesome. I stopped by his house that night and watched him play as Terran. It was love at first sight. I remember seeing him control a couple groups of goliaths and being completely blown away. I bought the game the next day with my employee discount, which got me about $4 off the game (thanks for nothing Best Buy).
Starcraft has been a big influence in my life. In the coming posts I'll talk about how Starcraft stole my sleep from me as a Freshman in college, where I didn't want to be, how it drove me to build my first computer and the subsequent love triangle with computer hardware. I'll talk about how Starcraft fairly directly shaped my career as a computer programmer. I'll go back to one of the first online communities I became a part of thanks to Starcraft, and how it made the game that much more appealing, and I'll probably go over my perspective on the Starcraft community over the last 11 years. In the end I'll flush out some of these memories, and give a little something to read to those nineteen trolls. Later.