Bunker Project Log

Dateline: Game Developers Conference, March 9, 2005 – Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. I’m sitting in the Grand Ballroom, waiting for the Microsoft keynote, titled “The HD Era”. J. Allard looked tragically hip, with his suited hoodie and preaching the MS game gospel. I, being a corporate droid, fell hook line and sinker for the endless possibilities of micro-payments and downloadable content and the this and the that and the other.

Then, J shows us Forza Motorsport. For the unwashed, this was the moment when Microsoft gave away 1000 HD TVs to anyone wearing the badge colored the same as the winning car. I had blue, Mrs. G had yellow. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, one of the two was the winning color, and I was sent to wait in line and sign the forms. Effectively, it became mine.

That’s why there is a TV in the bathroom, and sponsored by Microsoft, no less!

Anyway, as I said, my good buddy J had me at “micro-payments.” To me, MS really had it right with the new Live and the 360 was going to be the shizzle. I had to have that machine!

So I showed my commitment by making sure not to pre-order the 360. Genius. This led to many a night of considering standing in line, but not. I mean, the age of the 360 was the video game event of the epoch, but it was cold outside!

I finally managed to get one on Christmas Eve. That is a long and complicated story, and I don’t tell those, so I’ll skip it. The long and short of it is, I got a 360, and I got it after all the bugs had been fixed! My 360 is 604 days old.

And just 2 days ago, my drive started stuttering while reading discs and sometimes not starting at all.

Microsoft Xbox 360 3-Year Warranty, FTW!

Another year, another apartment. “A small, cramped basement apartment.” to quote Tyler Durden.

This lan was all over my huge computer desk, and the fourth machine was in the kitchen counter. For some reason, all I remember doing here was playing Quake II Coop, and the Holy Wars mod.

There was a good reason for this…

Somewehere along the way I had met the girly who is now my wife. She was a lawyer at the time, and had coped with law school by playing Doom instead of studying. I thought that was pretty cool.

However, there was a bit of a “skill gulf” between the two of us… so coop it was.

Note to the game industry: if you really want to attract more female players, you need to put coop mode back in. (And add options to remove spiders.)

As for Holy Wars, for those who don’t know, this is a Q2 mod that changes the rules of the game. It is like “kill the guy with the ball” or “Oddball” on Halo. Basically, there is a single halo in the game that must be found and picked up. The player who does this becomes the Saint. The Saint glows brightly, even through walls, so s/he is hard to miss. All other players are marked Sinners. Sinners are allowed to kill the Saint, but penalized (or even booted from the game) if they kill other Sinners. The Saint is allowed to kill anyone.

The great thing about this is, the most skilled player usually gets the halo, so the less skilled players are polarized against him/her. This keeps the n00bs from constantly being killed (and frustrated with the game). It also ensures that there is a challenge for the best player, since everyone is against him/her. Finally, by the law of averages, even the n00best of n00bs will be the one taking off that final HP off the Saint, giving them the satisfaction of actually killing the best player in the group.

Featured Games
Quake II
Starcraft

I finally got out of the hotel and moved into an apartment building. I’d made friends at work, so of course, it was time for a Lan party.

This was a great time for hardware. My company was switching over to Windows 95, and was ditching tons of old stuff. I was making a decent salary and had no expenses, so I could spend freely on the parts I couldn’t scrounge. There were lots of demos floating around, and the games that were out were free with licensing on Lan games. (Contrast that with today… almost every game requires a unique CD key, even for Lan gaming!)

So I had about six machines set up on a table in the dining room. Duke Nukem was my favorite, but Jedi Knight was on there as well. I remember spending a lot of time getting the sound in DN3D working. (Does anyone remember Soundblaster environment variables??!!)

After about two weeks of setup and worrying about getting everything perfect, I was finally ready. I invited about 10-20 people, went out and bought drinks and chips and all that party crap, and…

Two people showed up.

Have any of you had a Lan party with two people? Much less… two people who came not really to play, but to party?

Needless to say, it was lame. I don’t think we even played anything that night.

Surprisingly though, all was not lost. The Lan did live on at lunch time. For a while, four or five of us would drive out to my place over lunch and get a good 45 minutes of Quake II deathmatch in. Things were finally starting to catch on!

Finally Online
Regardless of what happened on the Lan, I had a phone line for the first time in seven months, so I spent quite a bit online with my buddy Jjam playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I had made this groovy map that was quartered by bodies of water from the center left to center right, and center top to center bottom. On each quarter were giant fields of gems. We would start at opposite corners, build our bases and chat. Jjam wasn’t very much of a gamer, so I always ended up taking the other two quarters, building up a massive force, then just pounded his stuff. I think we both just wanted something to do. Good times.

Featured Games:
Duke Nukem 3D
Quake II
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
Jedi Knight
Descent 2

At some point in late 1996, the company I was working for was bought, and I was shipped out to the East Coast. I lived in a hotel across from work for seven months while they tried to figure out what to do with me.

So, I had a truck full of computers and crap, with not many options other than to just set them up. The room was a suite, so I had a weird little kitchen area with a table (to put two computers on) and a third computer on the dresser. Unfortunately, I didn’t have too many guests, being the weirdo new guy.

So, I only had one game in seven months, and that was a two-man deatchmatch in Terminator: Future Shock. Boo.

Featured Games:
Quake 2
Diablo
Terminator: Future Shock

Thinking back, I still don’t know how I could afford it. In fact, it probably stayed on my credit card until 2001. Somehow though, I managed to buy parts for 4 486-DX2-66’s. You young whippersnappers probably don’t know that “modding” options for pc cases were limited to switching the Mhz display on the front from 33 to 66. My clever thing was to have the LED’s spell MW when viewed sideways.

Anyway, those were the days of Doom, followed by Doom II, then Descent and Rise of the Triad. As I’m typing this, I’m remembering so much dead tech… DOS, Pharlap, QEMM. Loading network drivers from boot disks. Playing Descent on Kali (My Kali ID is less than 1000, but I can’t find it!)

Life was very different before Windows 95.

I still have fond memories of that OS. It really was an amazing time. Launch day was ridiculous, and although MS has tried, nothing really has topped it for me.

So, back to the Lan… I was in a weird rental house in the frozen north. All of the machines sat side by side on a hollow-core luaun door that was held up by 2 short Target file cabinets. They were token ringed together, which was the dominant networking topology for cheapskates like me who couldn’t afford a hub. Token ring was basically a daisy-chained string of coaxial cable with T’s at each machine, and terminators at the ends. And… just like Christmas lights, if one piece goes out, every part of the chain thereafter is hosed.

As you all should know, Doom was it. It was the thing that revolutionized the graphics card industry, the cpu industry, and the networking industry. I wholeheartedly believe that if it were not for Doom, the PC, and even console world would like very different than it does now.

Featured Games:
Doom
Doom II
Rise of the Triad
Descent
Magic Carpet
Hi-Octane
Diablo Demo
Command and Conquer