| Ultima ][ Was one of my first games, which I found on a floppy left in an Apple ][e in 8th grade ~1990 or so... which got me and my best friend into gaming (and trouble) Later, I was one of two on the Developer Relations Group (along with said best friend) @SC5 Intel and my cube was right next to Andy Grove - we had the same pee-schedule, for whatever reason Andy and I always seemed to only intersect in the restroom to pee.. Anyway - UO was a huge part of us validating the Celeron CPU as an acceptable gaming platform, aiming for a <$1,000 PC... This is when NURBS dolphin was 'THEE demo' (I had gone to school for 3D animation in Seattle (Mesmer, which became UW's animation course a year after I graduated, and thus I didnt get an 'accredited' degree because they bought the school, on SGIs - and was when NT4 was porting Softimage, Maya to PCs, we had the first AGP cards, first OpenGL ports of things and a new engine, Unreal) Anyway - we ran a bank of Intel's highest end machines at the time and had 6 UO accounts connected with a T3 - so we dominated UO PK scene because we had zero lag, and everyone else was on 56K... Man that was the golden era of my gaming life... We had an unlimited expense account at Frys Electronics and could buy anything we liked. But the best thing was how we were able to PK others with our bank of 6 acccounts, and we had a Canadian Pot Dealer who had a T1 (he shipped Cannabis via fedex to the states and made enough to pay $1,500/month for the T1 to his house) that played with us and was the 3rd member in our guild... We had two accounts which were 'Snoop' and 'Sneak' and we would follow our Great Lords and Dread Lords ; all with 100 Hide Skill... so we would hide our Great Lords next to our Dread Lords with the same name... We would taunt folks, with Dread - then hide right next to the Great Lord as the attacked and they would attack and kill the Great Lord, lose reputation, and then our hidden Snoop and Sneak chars would loot our Great Lords so that the enemy wouldnt get any loot... and only after the battle did they realize how duped they were... Later, after Intel, I ran IT for the company that published (physically manufactured) Everquest and had same early beta access to everquest... but that game was not the same as UO. I was there when Lord British was assassinated. (dont get me started on Lag Death when playing against one of the top Quake players on a T3 at Intel (MyM) |