Paul's RPG Background

After writing three posts to the blog, DW Reminded me that I had not properly introduced myself to the reader, so I have decided to come back and redo the first post so that you have some idea where I came from, and why I have authority to make sweeping generalizations about games :).

I grew up in the days before the Internet. From 1985-1989, I dabbled in table-top RPGs and card games like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma Wars, Top Secret, Cyberpunk, Star Wars, Up Front, and a few others whose names I can't recall. Most of my actual experiences with these games were negative, but in my imagination, they remained the most awesome idea ever: a game that allows you to use your imagination to create and play in any story you choose! Unfortunately, I never met anyone who was into those games that didn't have some kind of major baggage or social ineptitude. (Perhaps I'll dedicate a future entry to these characters...) At any rate, when I wasn't feebly attempting to play RPGs or talking about how awesome they were with the few normal friends I had, I was reading Choose Your Own Adventure books (mostly fantasy stuff, with a little sci-fi every now and then). I was also reading a bunch of straight-up fantasy, sci-fi, and horror novels. I read Tolkein and Lewis twice, and most of Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, along with almost all of Gibson's cyberpunk stuff, and many, many titles by Stephen King. I also became an avid collector of Marvel X-Men comics in high school.

When personal electronics began to come on the scene, I spent a lot of time playing on the Atari 2600 at friends' houses, but my own consoles were an Odyssey 2 and an Intellivision with Intellivoice. I did get razzed by my Atari friends for having those two consoles. I was one of the first kids in my group of friends to have a Tandy 1000, which turned out to be a pretty kick-ass game machine in the day. I learned to type by playing Sierra's Quest games (mostly King's Quest, but also Space Quest, Hero's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry):
siwm/
swin/
sim/
CRAP!!!!
SWIM/
whew!
Look in teh chest/
-you can't do that here.
WHAT!? I'm right in front of it, oh,
Look in the chets/
-You can't do that here.
OMG WHY NOT!!! Oh..
Look in the chest/

To this day, I have never been formally trained in IT or in electronics of any kind, and yet my whole family considers me the go-to guy for tech issues. Everything I learned about technology in some way relates to my obsession with games. Almost every new title I brought home required some kind of edited Autoexec.bat or Config.sys file, so my buddies and I would get together and force the Tandy to play the game we wanted to play. I was pretty good at working with MS-DOS, and when windows came out, that knowledge helped me to understand and make it function better.  I played many different games constantly throughout my teens and twenties, but my favorites were always the fantasy/RPG types.

Other Fantasy/RPG titles I played on the PC were:

• Zork
• Wishbringer
• The Bard's Tale (I can still hear my PC's internal speaker squawking out the theme song for this one!)
• Castle Wolfenstein
• Defenders of the Crown
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Lands of Lore
• Loom
• Myth I, II, & III
• Oregon Trail
• Pool of Radiance
• Sid Meier's Covert Action
• Some of the Ultima titles
• Prince of Persia
• Thief: The Dark Project (and the two sequels--LOVE THIS SERIES)
• Vampire: The Masquerade

In the early 90s, when one of my tech buddies showed me electronic mail, and later, X-windows, I was HOOKED on the potential for internet gaming.  I skipped the BBS culture completely, and dived into the realm of IRC RPG.  I dabbled a bit in MUDs, but the lack of graphics made it a hard sell.  When Diablo came out in 1997, it became my world.  To this day, I sometimes wake up with the haunting theme from Tristram stuck in my head (Shtay a wh-ile and lishten!)

Imagine my thrill when Asheron's Call was released in 1999 (somehow, I never played Ultima Online--to this day, I have no idea how I missed this!)!  Finally, my two loves had merged: the ability to create a character and play as that character in a graphical world with lots of other players online!  Everquest came out that same year, but I only had enough money for a subscription to one game, so I only played AC, but many of my friends online were Eversmack addicts as well.  In addition to AC, I have also played:

• Anarchy Online (played an engineer, but only for a couple weeks)
• Dark Age of Camelot (played as Artfull Dodger, an Albion assassin)
• Earth & Beyond (Played Mereor, a merchant)
• EVE Online (played a free trial, but quit when I saw how time consuming it was going to become)
• Neverwinter Nights (not technically an MMO, but I did play it online a few times)
• Shadowbane (I played a Shadowclan Firekei--one of my best MMO experiences ever!)
• Silkroad Online (plug and chug, non stop, no real RP)
• Star Wars Galaxies (my first real attempt at being a crafter)

These days, I am mostly a console gamer, but I continue to wait for the release of a truly great MMORPG; one that merges all that is great about table-top gaming and computer grpahic adventures; the Ideal MMORPG!