Gaming, Online gaming, and my intro to WoW

This will be a potted history of me and gaming, and kind of story of why I am where I am today….as I start to write this I really don’t know how long it will get, or how many posts it will take, but I don’t suppose a lack of advanced planning will hurt a blog, so I’ll just start, and we’ll see where it takes me

I’ve always liked computer games, for as long as I can remember, the first computer I ever personally owned was a Spectrum 128k +2, and I had hours of entertainment out of that thing, I loved it….especially the adventure games like the “Dizzy” series
I bought my first PC with my student loan when I first went to university, and while I did of course use it to write up assignments and stuff, I of course played games too…
I went to Uni in the late 1990’s, right about the time when internet became affordable for “financially average” people, meaning that it was no longer a toy for the ultra-rich, and that meant most people could afford it, so it became popular

At around the same time I discovered the internet while away at uni, a very close friend of mine from my home town had started playing a MUD called MUME – Multi Users in Middle Earth, a text game based on Tolkiens world…as a Tolkien and game fan, I had to try it….
MUME is still around today, amazing really…

I first played MUME at my friends house in 1996, and of course being naïve I didn’t think I would like it, so chose a stupid name for my character, thinking I would only be playing for a couple of hours to humour my friend and was going to be a means of keeping in touch with him…I was known back then as “Gibbon the Man Magic User” (basically a human mage)
Well….after the first 20 mins I was hooked, and stupid name or not, that was it…3 years later when I left Uni, my combined playtime on all my characters (some of which have names that live on today on my WoW characters) was well into the 60 day area…a number which I thought was HUGE at the time, but compared to my WoW time these days, wasn’t all that much
I still log in maybe twice a year when I get nostalgic (I bet I log in later on today now, having been writing about it) but nobody I know still plays as far as I know

That was my first trip into the world of online, multiplayer gaming…and I only stopped playing because when I moved back home from uni, I had no job and had to move back into my parents house, and there was no way they were allowing me to play a computer game into the small hours on a daily basis, and they certainly didn’t want to pay the phone bill for me to do so (back then most internet suppliers in the UK charged by the hour of connection)…so I quit in late 1999

I still kept an interest in games, but mostly in the form of single player games such as Might and Magic, Command and Conquer, Diablo 1&2(offline only) in which I could simply save the game when I got distracted or whatever

Fastforward to years later, I was older and wiser, now employed, living away from my parents, and had some money (enough to pay for an internet provider at least) and one day at work I overheard a few people talking in a corridor….I heard the odd word like “Orc, Paladin, xp, level”, that type of thing….I shrugged it off, but then a few days later I heard them again….same type of conversation…..this time I asked them what they were on about….and was told about this online game they’d been getting into called World of Warcraft…..and the rest, as they say….is history

Except it isn’t, this wouldn’t be much of a WoW blog if I wrote about my gaming pre-WoW and left my actually WoW story as a one liner….


I will write more…..but it will be in a different post