Part 1: How I Discovered Quake 2 at TOA

(This is the boring part)

My name is Ron. It was 1998 when I was introduced to The Temple of Assassins and Quake II. A veteran of Alt.Tastless for several years, I really enjoyed communication. I also enjoyed videogames, but hadn't moved much beyond Super Mario World. It was summer and I went over to Eric's house to go swimming. Eric was playing some first person shooter game when I got there. It looked better than Doom I thought. These messages kept popping up on the screen in tiny green letters. I leaned forward to read them. The font was ugly and hard to read.

"So the game sends you these messages along the way"?

He says, "no, the other players are sending these messages".

"You're playing against real people"? He says, "yeah, it's pretty cool. I can send them messages and they can send me messages. See, I hit ~ and I type what I want to say, hit enter and everyone can read it. I can also do chat binds. I bind a certain phrase to a key. For instance, I can bind 'good game' to the U key and just hit that key at the end of a map". 

"You can say anything" I asked?

"Pretty much".

I was stunned. This was a sweet moment for me. Video games had become boring because there was no real reward for investing the time to defeat a game. With Quake II online, it was different. Completely different. The experience never got old. It would always be exciting. You could play the same game everyday and not get bored. After 15 minutes the map would end and a new one would begin or someone would hit the fraglimit (50 kills) and a new map would begin. There was no winning. No final battle. No prize. Just fragging. The Temple of Assassins was known to people who play quake as simply TOA. At TOA they played a form of Quake called Lithium. In our form it added a grappling hook, runes and you always begin with the rocket launcher. What are runes? They were these giant spinning gems that would give you double damage (red), Double speed (yellow), and so on. Who decided this? Pat. The man who started TOA. He owned a small ISP called Accunet. Everyone knew him as "TheKind". He and a guy who went by "Madman" were the admins. It wasn't long before a guy named RocketOz would also be added as an admin and eventually Gulf.

I was eager to play! Eric gave me a quick tutorial. Right hand on the mouse, left on the directional keys and my pinky on the ctrl key for the grappling hook. After a few maps I realized something. I was terrible at Quake II. The game was very difficult. I couldn't hit anyone. Eric said, "you've got to lead them a bit because our ping is high".

"What"?

"We have a high ping. We are on dial up. Our connection is slow and we are pretty far from Carlinville Illinois. (The server's location) We are HPBs or High Ping Bastards. Those guys that are flashing past us are LPBs, Low Ping Bastards".

"Get a faster connection"!

"I can't. All that is available to us is dial up. I hope cable or DSL will be available soon. They have it in Charlotte, but Charlotte is a lot bigger than Gastonia".

"This sucks"!

"Our connection is what sucks. We have packet loss which compounds our problems".

When you have packet loss you can be running down a hall and the screen freezes up for a few moments and then you're dead. Your computer didn't receive the packets of information letting you know that someone had entered the hall and was firing upon you. Bang you're dead and never had a chance.

"What can we do about this"? I ask.

So Eric tells me about bots. Bots are auto aimers that do the aiming for you. All you have to do is click the fire button.

"I wanna try it".

So Eric downloads the Ratbot and I use it. There are several problems with running around holding the fire button down. First, if you have a high ping, you are shooting at a place were a player used to be. Second, players tend to notice rockets flying out of a player's back. Sure enough, people noticed that there were rockets flying out of my back.

The result? Eric's IP was banned.

Eric was not particularly happy at getting his IP banned from this, his favorite Q2 server.

I emailed TheKind and promised never to use a bot again. I said that I just did it that one time out of frustration at having such a poor connection and being unable to have any success. After several such pleas, he relented and restored our access. 

I then began to employ a new strategy. Camping. I would find a hiding place where I would not be so easily seen and fire from there. Most maps provided areas where one could successfully do this. As I got better I became cocky with my improvement. I began to employ chatbinds that expressed my pleasure at being difficult to remove from a camping spot. Some of these taunts were met with laughter from the ones who had a sense of humor. They found me amusing. I would become friends with those people. The ones that got mad and hated it, would just get angrier with time. Either you loved me or hated me. There weren't that many riding the fence when it came to Spiderman on TOA.

That's right, I went by "Spiderman". As time went by I would play under other names, like Steve McQueen.

Among my favorite taunts were classics like:

"I am pitching a tent on your remains!"

"Reamed by Spidey again!"

"I'm naked!"

"I'm only playing with one hand!

"Death from above"

"I love you"

"I'm coming!"

"Please drive through"

Those were just a few.

Much as I enjoyed talking trash during the game, that was nothing compared with my joy at discovering the Temple of Assassins Forum. More on that later.