Well, at the time, I was writing my own internet multi-player game....a text-only persistent world. It a sort-of clone of Gemstone III for 16 players and had been running it locally over 16 phone lines at the house, with a lot of success. Then I discovered the internetz, and was busily retrofitting the game for sockets and upscaling to 128 players. I had actually QUIT MY FREAKIN JOB to develop the internet version.
So then I was looking around at the internet for competition....found meridian 59 and was relieved to find it was more or less unplayable...saw a couple of others...and then ran into EQ. It was May of 1999. I had a bad feeling right away...and then when it opened and I stepped into it in June my jaw dropped and I knew it was game over for me, no freakin way a single person could compete with that. So went back to work and played EQ for the next 8 years.
As far as what happened, I rolled up a human ranger that first day, dropped into Surefall Glade, and spent like an hour trying to get out of there because I COULD NOT SEE lol. Then when I was out I surveyed the land before me. Lots of people running around killing stuff, training beetles to guards lol. I remember being on the little ridge just to the left of the SF entrance, back to back with another player, valiantly fighting the skeles...soon we were dead but it was a blast. Lots of great memories.
In fact, thats why I just rolled up a new ranger here on eq99. I tried a Sony TLP server for a while, but they are blowing through expansions so fast that it might as well be a live server, plus they didn't actually regress the code base so its still EZ mode in any case. So if you see a very young ranger around qeynos named Fadetree, its me. I like it a lot...I was *thrilled* to get a backpack and a coupla +5 HP ears off the injured rat in the catacombs, and had to RUN FOR MY LIFE in actual fear when I had a coupla red giant rats aggro on me. I barely made it to the exit. See, thats what you don't get on the live servers..actual dread and actual ( well sorta ) accomplishments.
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