1996

The Beginning

It all began in the spring of 1996 when I obtained a game called Warcraft II. I had been obsessed with Warcraft 1 and was amazed that you could make a building with a man and then get more men from the building, so this was my first real RTS experience. Mystic Hun and I played on our LAN 1v1 Warcraft 1 for many months before getting War2.

When Warcraft2 came along it had a whole new gaming experience - internet gaming! - At the time I didnt even have an internet connection, so I got one and a 2400/2400 (2.4K) modem and got a software package called Kali. Now War2 ran in DOS - this was before direct-x came along and so you needed all these strange programs to get you connected to the Kali network. Anyway to cut a long story short, Hun and I loved War2 and got playing it on Kali with others on the internet. I called myself Mystic Mage of Azeroth. She called herself Miss Death of Blackrock Spire.

Soon we invested in 486 computers and windows 95 - Kali95 was born and we used this to play online and signed up for Cases ladder. It took hun and I about 2 weeks to get into the top 1000, then a couple of weeks later we got into the top 100. This was really tough and we couldnt get any higher, so we practiced hard on a map called X Marks the spot and got very good at it, this took us to the top 20 where we stayed for about 3 months. We got into the top 10 too and eventually number 1. We left after staying about 9 months when some hack arrived and ruined the game. They basically allowed you to get tier 3 units at the start in tier 1.

We still played online and had many friends, but I went over to creating single-player maps and gave them out to people on the internet to play, they were very popular and I had quite a following, with some people building web sites featuring the best War2 maps.