EPT
So anyway, how did I get into PC gaming? I don't remember exactly what got me interested in PC gaming before I had a PC myself. I remember though that in like 4th grade it was THE incredibly forbidden and bad ass thing to go to one of my classmate's and watch Terminator 2 or (ghasp!) watch his brother play Wolfenstein 3D. Google screenshots of this milestone of a game - it was the state of the art back then.
![[image loading]](/staff/zatic/wolf3d_pc.png)
Hitler had two miniguns and looked pissed as hell
I started playing myself taking turns with my best friend on his dad's 386 - a grotesquely huge 33Mhz monster machine. We mostly played Commander Keen (<3) and other jump 'n' run games, or split screen Tanks. As good kids we were of course limited to 1 hour daily, after that his dad would take away the monitor cable or disable the machine in some other way, which of course only got us to learn how to set up computers ourselves.
![[image loading]](/staff/zatic/Commander_keen4.gif)
The original Commander Keen
At some point my friend go his own 486 machine - a beastly 66Mhz PC with Turbo button. This was when we started playing "real" multiplayer games. Windows 95 had just come out which made networking somewhat possible. My friend got a modem and we hooked up his computer to his dad's by calling his dad's modem number on the inhouse phone system. Thus we were able to play C&C, and later Warcraft2 against each other! We were both totally into RTS, until, well, Duke3D hit. Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I experienced something like competitive gaming with. It must have been 1996 when we discovered there was an actual competitive Duke3D league out there, the DDL (Deutsche Duke Liga, German Duke League). It was a challenge ladder run by a dude called Nostromo. The league was organized in AOL chat rooms and you would challenge another player - meaning you had to call them by modem (and pay for the long distance call...) for the game. If you won, you traded places on the ladder.
There was also a server in Munich where you could call in (long distance...) to simulate a LAN - actually play with more than 2 people in the game!
My friend got totally addicted. He played 8 player Duke3D on Stadium or Hollywood (Duke3D had just great, great maps, what a legendary game) "in" Munich all the time. However after his parents got the 450+ bucks phone bill for just one month, they pulled the plug on online gaming for the time being.
![[image loading]](/staff/zatic/duke.png)
Duke 3D Atomic Edition - what an insane game!
We had to look at alternatives. I got my own PC (a ridiculously fast Pentium 200Mhz!) and we tried to set up LANs. Now, settings up a LAN back then was something completely different from today. Getting more than 2 PC hooked up over LAN with Windows 95 meant basically to randomly reinstall network drivers and scream at your PC for 1-2 days, followed by 1-2 days of actual gaming. Network equipment was fucking expensive too. A network adapter was ~120 bucks, a switch several hundreds. So we had to use Token ring networks, which is a story for itself; Let's just say whenever 1 Win95 PC crashed (happened a lot), it took down the entire network. Still, we managed to get LANs going, still playing Duke3D and Shadow Warrior (<3) and C&C and Red Alert (Btw, funny how Westwood was considered the holy grail of RTS back then).
At one point we even had a network cable running across the street from my friend's place to his neighbor, but it got damaged one stormy night I think.
![[image loading]](/staff/zatic/cnc.jpg)
The legendary RTS
By 1997 most of Germany was on ISDN (digital telephone line) so you could say bye-bye to those horrible modems and join the new age of fast, affordable internet. I started playing a lot of Jedi Knight, which was an incredible game at that time and a hell lot of fun to play online too. There was also rumors about two upcoming games, Half-Life and Unreal, both promised to change the FPS world.
Still, at one point all those did not matter anymore. Starcraft hit the shelves. It was love on first sight. We all forgot that there was even a genre FPS - everyone played Starcraft. We set up 8 people LANs just to play insanely long 8 player FFA NR games or run micro tournaments. It was absolutely beautiful. I devoured everything there was to know about Starcraft, sat over unit size and damage type statistics, figured out the most stupid strategies and cursed how imba Zerg was. We played all those stupid Blizzard standard maps and we were still mostly clueless about competitive Starcraft (Which can be attributed to the fact that not a single one of us actually bought the game - pirating was the thing to do).
![[image loading]](/staff/zatic/jediknight.jpg)
May the force be with you
I marveled over the screenshots from the Brood War beta (Valkyries with napalm bombs!!!) and when Brood War was released everyone played even more SC. Eventually a few of us started playing 2vs2 on B.net, and quickly the skill gap got enormous as others lost interest. Still, it was the RTS of the time, and the game to play on LAN, everything else was completely forgotten (Red Alert, lol).
There was a period of Quake and later Quake 2, but I can't really figure out when we started to play and stop playing them. For some reason the Quake series wasn't well received among the circle of people I used to play with - maybe that was because everyone started each game with single player before trying multi player, and the Quake series, while visually spectacular, were nothing compared to the story telling and fun of the likes of Duke3D, Jedi Knight, or Shadow Warrior.
![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/zatic/unreal_5.jpeg)
In 1998, these graphics were truly Unreal
The two mentioned games, Unreal and later Half-Life were released in 1998 and indeed they were both amazing. I don’t think I'll ever forget the feeling of playing Unreal the first time, especially walking out of the crashed spaceship and suddenly seeing this huuuuuuuuuuuge environment, of a scale PC games haven't had shown before. Still, Unreal was unplayable online or in LAN (most buggy network code ever?) up until UT and for some reason Half Life DM got boring pretty quickly - plus the never released TF2 was what we were all waiting for haha. So in multi player and on LANs Starcraft was still what I played most.
Until 1999, when a friend told me about this new mod for Half Life, called Counter-Strike.
To be continued.
Part 2: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=92762
