My Life's Addiction, Part 5: High School

The transition from Junior High to High School brought with it, among other things, more money to play with. My paper routes had served me for years, but I was getting a little old for that sort of thing, and, at the ripe old age of 15, I found the perfect replacement: refereeing hockey games. My paper routes had earned me maybe $100-200 a month; on the rink, I could easily pull in $300 in a single weekend if I took enough games. Though it was a significant time commitment, it only lasted for a few months out of the year, and because I've always been more of a saver than a spender (says the guy that's typing this up on a $4000 laptop, I know, but still, it's true), so the money lasted quite nicely, keeping me in games.

The first major purchase to be made with my new incomes was a Pentium 90, which at the time was about 4 steps down from top-of-the-line, and which functioned as a more-than-adequate replacement for my aging 386. I also picked up a Super Nintendo, though my usage of that was far less prolific; Final Fantasy VI (which I knew as Final Fantasy III at the time) and Super Metroid were about my only two real time-wasters to emerge from that particular console.

That said, I didn't use the computer for much at first, either. My Sophomore year was anything but All About the Games; as the 9th grade had tailed to a close I had found myself in a relationship for the first time, with a girl named Tracy, with whom I had very little in common, except for a desire to be with someone. There wasn't much real attraction, and the relationship was pretty much a lackluster affair, never so bad as to be described as a disaster, but not nearly worthy of the 9 months that it actually lasted.

When we broke up (finally, after weeks of barely speaking; neither one of us really had the guts to take that final step), she was almost immediately replaced with Cindi, who was nice, and attractive, and who I shared many a wonderful conversation with, but who was also as hardcore an evangelical Christian that I have ever met. She actually had subscriptions to Christian-themed girl magazines (laid out much like Seventeen or any one of those other primary-color teen girl rags, but with very different content), where on the covers were quizzes along the lines of "Are you dating a Godly guy?" Of course, she wasn't, and I was very open about that fact from the beginning. I was well on my way to full-fledged antireligious atheism, and while the difference wasn't really a problem for me, it definitely was for her. She liked me, her parents liked me, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly when she dumped me out of the blue. In so doing, she admitted that it was a decision based 100% on religion, and that while her parents loved me, there was "someone else" that didn't approve of the relationship, by which I knew she meant her Youth Group leader. That left a bitter taste, and has, to a degree, helped to shape my feelings regarding organized religion (though I suppose I should stress that there are many, many, many other factors that shape my current stance).

The relationship with Cindi ended towards the end of my Sophomore year, just as I was turning 16 and acquired my Driver's License. By then, my friendship with Brac had fairly well deteriorated, and I went without a girlfriend for some time. Much of that summer was spent hanging around with Schoop, who I knew from the band, and who was into all kinds of different board games. We spent a great deal of time playing classics like Axis & Allies (generally roping together three more people), Talisman, Risk, Stratego, and good old-fashioned Chess (unlike Brac, I could usually rip Schoop apart; unlike me, he was highly frustrated by constantly losing).

Around this time came my first exposure to the Internet. My brother had been really into BBS's, or "Bulletin Board Systems", computers that people had set up that essentially functioned as servers where people could dial in over the modem, post messages on primitive message boards, and play asychronously multiplayer games. I only dabbled, and then, only in games, but my dealings with them got me comfortable with modems, and that led to an easy and early transition to the Internet through a local ISP offered through the newspaper.

When it came to the Net, for a great while I was more of an observer than a participant, my activities more or less limited to searching for game demos to download and occasionally participating in IRC. I could foresee, as most people could, that the Internet was likely to get much better, but at the time, the thought of online gaming was more or less a fantasy. The games I was playing, "multiplayer" meant you had someone next to you on the couch, with a controller in hand. It wasn't until midway through my Junior Year that that perception started to change, through a simple conversation with my friend Matt.

Matt was an acquaintence more than a friend, actually; we knew each other through the band, and had been sitting next to one another for an hour each day for the past five years. He was the perpetual first chair trombone, and I was the perpetual second; even in our Sophomore years, we had out-tested all the Juniors and Seniors for the coveted first two spots (a fact one of the seniors actually got quite bitter about). I was always good - I've long taken pride in my musical ability - but Matt made me look like a bloody rookie. He was out of this world, easily the best musician in the school (and we had two violin players from the orchestra go on to major in Violin Performance at the University of Michigan). Where I could play pretty much any sequence of notes you could throw at me with accuracy, Matt used that accuracy as a mere starting point, and on his first read through a difficult piece could infuse with flair. His talent was freakish. He had perfect natural pitch, could tell you if your tuning slide was a millimeter out with no reference, and if anyone in the band, on any instrument, had a solo but was absent from class that day, Matt could fill in perfectly, after hearing it done correctly only once. It was really something to behold. When it came to music, I looked up to Matt a great deal, but we had never really interacted outside of the band.

He did know me well enough to know that I was into computer games, though, of course, and that led to the simple conversation that probably changed me life forever. At the end of the Advanced Algebra & Trig class that we shared (like most people as talented as he was at Music, he was equally good at Math), he let me know that he had gotten a new computer that week, and he was looking to try out the modem. I said, sure, I could probably work that out. He asked if I had Doom, and I said yes, I did, and so we exchanged numbers and set up a multiplayer game later that night.

That must have been a Friday, because I remember that we set up a co-op game and ripped through a good chunk of the campaign that night, then when we finished a certain level, turned on each other and started fragging the crap out of one another. It was more fun than I could have possibly guessed. He felt the same, and we played again the next day, and the next, ripping through the entirety of the single player campaign as a team and then setting up maps to go head-to-head. From that point on, we were addicted; it was blindingly clear that this little hobby wasn't going anywhere any time soon.

With Brac, video games had been the glue that sustained our friendship; with Matt, video games were the friendship; outside of band, we essentially never interacted unless video games were a part of it. And our friendship, in this fashion, would extend long into College, despite our going to different schools.

Junior Year turned into Senior Year, Doom turned into Doom 2, and a host of other games, mostly demos downloaded from the net, or cd-cracked games that one of the two of us would pick up and spread to the other. That's pretty much what we spent the summer doing (though I did do more than my share of hanging out with Schoop, and other friends I had made through Schoop).

By the time Senior Year rolled around in truth, somehow I found my social standing somewhat - different - than I was used to. I was used to being an outsider, a loner, someone that people didn't generally interact with unless they had a specific reason. For some reason I can't quite peg, that changed in the 12th grade. It wasn't that I was no longer a geek - I was probably spending more time playing video games than ever before - it was perhaps more along the lines of, being a geek was almost a new sort of cool by then, or at least, the qualities that had been seen as geekish and antisocial in the past were now almost kind of cool. Where I had previously been seen as abrasive, I was now seen as aggressive, and aggressive was kind of a good thing. I had a good time my Senior Year. I dated casually, for the first time in my life. I made friends with people I never thought I would ever be friends with (and who, against all odds, turned out to be kind of cool): members of the football team, cheerleaders, the prom king and queen. Altogether, it was a mighty fine time.

And all the while, I was playing video games with Matt, anything that supported a modem connection. We scoured the Internet; we'd try anything once. We convinced our parents to spring for second phone lines in our houses (the phone company was just starting to pick up on this trend, and it was only an extra $5 a month at the time), and that bumped up our playtime considerably.

One of the games we came across in our searches was a real-time strategy game by a then-unknown company named "Blizzard Entertainment" called "Warcraft: Orcs and Humans". I was familiar with the RTS genre - I had played Westwood Studio's Dune 2 to completion with all three houses, and thought that it was a fantastic way to approach a game, and always remembered thinking that it would be a great way to approach from a fantasy perspective. Warcraft fulfilled this possibility nicely, and actually turned out to be a very fun game (though, in retrospect, it was deeply flawed in a few ways, most of them balance-related). At the time, though, Matt and I were enamored with the thought of a game where the object was to build up an army and beat the crap out of another human being on the other end of the line.

We saw the game's brilliance from the start, and became aware, over the Internet, that a sequel was forthcoming, one that would dwarf the original in both scope and polish. To say the very least, we were stoked; we scoured Blizzard's web site, and the various fan sites, for details; we downloaded video clips and designer diaries (before such things were commonplace, as they are today), and on December 9, 1995, we were the first two souls in our town to grab a copy, that Saturday morning, in a trip to the local mall and the electronics boutique as it opened.

The game was everything we thought it would be and more. Matt and I rushed through the single-player campaigns quickly, just to get a feel for the units we could build, and hopped into head-to-head matches over the modem almost immediately. I still remember the early stabs at unique strategy; the merits of orcs vs humans, of archers vs grunts, of offense vs defense, of hyper-aggression vs defense and counterattack. While the debates over these sorts of questions were to last for years, one thing was not debatable: we had found our new obsession.

Matt and I were both competitive people - when we played, we played to win, and when we lost, we would look back at the game in our memory to see where we had gone wrong, and what the other person had done right. We were surprisingly evenly matched, with styles to match our personalities. I was methodical, precise, efficient. Matt was creative, a gifted improv artist; he played the game like he ripped through a trombone solo, always looking for a unique way out of a passage. Were my build orders to meet up with his tactical skill, we realized, we would be nigh unto unstoppable.

That led to speculation concerning playing over the Internet as a team. We knew it was possible. Though War2 offered no intrinsic TCP/IP compatibility (games didn't do that back then), Matt, in his scouring of the Internet for Warcraft II related material, had come across a program called Kali, which was supposed to take advantage of a game's ability to support a local IPX network and convert your TCP/IP Internet connection to the sort needed for IPX. You could download the software for free and play for 15 minutes at a time at no charge; registration was $10 for unlimited playtime. This seemed fair, and when we downloaded the software to give it a try, it worked.

When you registered Kali, you were given a serial number, which was simply an increasing number; as time would go on, low serial numbers were a sign of prestige. Because Matt registered before Christmas break, as he wasn't going anywhere and felt he needed something to do, his serial was in the 1800's. I waited for a time, to the point where mine was 3975. In time, anything below 5 digits would be seen as incredible prestige; I actually had people offer me up to $50 for my serial number, and I actually declined them. Matt chose "MadDawg" for his online alias, after an impromptu nickname given to him for someone that was introducing him in a brass quintet that year, while I chose "Shaf", a monosyllabic shortening of my last name.

And so MadDawg and Shaf joined forces, at the Kali server that seemed to have the biggest community built up (Kali Central). Going 2 on 2 against random opponents, we quickly realized that we were heads and shoulders above the majority of the opposition. It didn't even seem like we were that good, rather, our opponents merely seemed to be that bad. They never worked together, they rarely attacked, the simply seemed to build up their towns, playing Sim City, waiting to die. For nigh unto a month, MadDawg and I went undefeated. It was candy from a baby. After a time, we felt invincible, and cocky as hell.

That was when Shlonglor and Warpmaster stepped into our random game.

You don't know these names, most likely, but we certainly did, and if there was a Warcraft II equivalent of Michael Jordan stepping into your pick-up game, this was it. Shlonglor was royalty. He ran the most popular - practically the only - Warcraft II fansite on the net, which generated literally thousands of hits per day. He updated it almost constantly, several times a day, and MadDawg and myself had both gained a lot from reading his strategy guide (interestingly, that strategy guide has been preserved and is available here). He was a college student, and Warp was one of his roommates (Gotcha was the other, also a well-known name and very good player).

We resolved ourselves not to be intimidated, and to bring our A game, to see how good we really were. For a time, the game seemed very even. We fended off an early attack and launched a marginally successful counter, but as we were being repelled, the lag demon struck and the game slowed down to unplayability. This was an aberration - our ISP was generally very good, and Shlonglor and Warp were known to have a broadband connection - but when it hit, it hit bad. Shlonglor and Warp said that it was too bad and said they were going to quit, and we agreed. That agreement, it later turned out, was one of the things that warmed us to them; usually when the lag got bad, for some reason people got pissy. We wound up having a nice conversation with them that ended with Shlonglor saying that the two of us were too good to be launching random 2on2's at Kali Central, and that if we fixed our connection, we should join them on another server; at the time it was Starlink, though it rotated between there, Axxis, and a couple others. And just like that, we were in.

It had been a little surprising to hop onto Kali and find that it already had a bit of a community, but it was even more surprising to learn that that community had already formed a bit of an elite aristocracy. That ruling class revolved largely around Shlonglor, whose web page had made him famous, and whose skills backed up his rather big mouth. He reveled in the attention, but not in a simplistic way. Our nights became spent largely in arranging matches, discussing strategy, and just shooting the shit. MadDawg and I learned that these players were generally about on a level with us, which was reassuring, because we knew that these guys were the best. It's strange to think that when I was 17, I was considered to be one of the best in the world at something.

Now, the sample size was extremely small, and in the years to come, particularly once Starcraft came out and absolutely exploded in popularity, I faded down to mediocrity and never really distinguished myself. What made us the best wasn't really any innate skill, it was what today would be considered very basic. We strove to be efficient. We strove to be aggressive. And we knew that War2 was, at its core, a game of economics, where the one side that out-produced the other almost always wound up on top. Back then, that simply knowledge was enough to place you among the elite.

Shlonglor's strategy page was the epicenter of that school of thought, and yet, at the same time, even then I could see that it was rather amateurishly written and that Shlonglor's thoughts weren't always coherent. I was just learning HTML at the time, and as my ISP offered 5MB of storage space for you to set up a web site, should you so desire, I decided to do just that. Soon "Shaf's Warcraft II page" was born, with the idea that it would be a bit of a counterpoint to Shlonglor's; emphasizing the same sorts of strategy, but with better writing and a different take. I was sure to give credit where it was due, and was careful not to plagiarize, but I knew that I could create good content, and I feel that I did.

Most Warcraft II fansites offered the same sort of cookie cutter material; basic info on the game, system requirements, cheat codes, maybe an overview of the single player campaigns and, if you were lucky, even a walkthrough. What separated mine and Shlonglor's pages from the rest is that ours were the first (and, then, the only) pages to focus almost exclusively on multiplayer. My single player section was very short; it essentially said "do NOT rely on the strategies that you use to beat the computer to work on another human". The core of both of our sites were the strategy guides that we produced.

For that reason, Shlonglor, who generally eschewed links to other sites on his page (as he was innundated with such requests), actually gave mine a link. Overnight, my page exploded in popularity, and generated on average about 10 emails a day. It was getting hundreds of hits, most of them getting to the strategy section, and suddenly, people started recognizing me. It was a strange phenomenon, but I decided I liked it. Maintaining my own Warcraft II page had given me a place of prestige. I resolved to update my page as often as I could. And then I met Jenni.