(Must have typed this up ages ago and forgot to press submit, bless the autosave feature)
Well for me I starting playing games with the NES, still remember the gold Zelda cartridge, my first game, thought it was magical ha. I’ve enjoyed Nintendo ever since, I still think there the best at making games despite their shortcomings over recent years. The imagination and creativity they’ve poured into their games is hard to beat. The Zelda and Metroid franchises remain my favourite. I’ve always been fascinated with the alternative worlds you get in games, being able to lose yourself in these worlds and explore them is very appealing to me, I always wanted to create my own worlds, used to make all sorts of crazy stuff with Lego as a kid.
Anyway eventually we got a PC at home and my dad was looking for free games and he stumbled onto the beta version of W:ET, he installed it and didn’t have a bloody clue how to move or anything so he gave up and let me try, took me a while to figure out how to move using trial and error as never played a game before on PC, once I found WASD I was good to go and figured out rest as went along.
Later on I heard about editing tools being released which let you make your own maps, I was super excited, finally could make my own stuff. Sadly it’s easier said than done, I think uninstalled GTK radiant about 3 times before I found a small forum with some folk who persuaded me to keep at it and learn for myself when I tried asking them to make stuff for me. One of those guys was Marko who made Temple map and was involved in all the MLB maps. I went on to try and make a series of maps based in an another world which the Axis discovered and moved all their secret weapons development to, unfortunately the Allies found out and crashed their party, I named the maps Battle of Wolken, as the world was a series of floating islands in the clouds.
Later ET:QW was released and was excited to get my hands on the editor for that, was awesome, made loads of maps which sadly didn’t get played much as not many folk wanted to try custom content in ET:QW, idiots. Helped a little with the promod, found a way to get extra forwards spawns into the game so we could improve Salvage map for 6v6. I was mainly learning all this for a big project I had planned for Wolfenstein which was a fleshed out version of the Battle of Wolken concept including SP campaign and MP maps, sadly that game turned out to be big disappointment and they didn’t release SDK, was well annoyed, helped out on the promod for that game too that kept it alive for an extra week or so…
Sometimes I actually played those games too, joined few clans, never amounted to much though, liked playing in matches but I can’t take it seriously as much as other teams do, was really lucky with TCM with the team we started out with, we were all pretty much same, easy going and had right laugh on comms, typically taking piss out of other team and ourselves, when things started to get more serious that’s when it became less fun, getting banned from LAN for drunkeness wasn’t great. I still prefer competitive style play though, mainly for the greater level of teamwork that is present.
