22:09, on September 3rd, 2002…
A young, idealistic British gamer with six years of competative FPS experience opens a personal blog the night before entering WGC, and sets off on a great adventure with a group of likeminded individuals, all in the pursuit of a lifetime’s worth of FPS gaming excellence and glory. We achieve much during our travels… we win many trophies, conquer many leagues, and gain a rather formidable reputation and community standing in the process. Some of us become server admins, website journalists and community leaders, some even go on to make it into development, and help give birth to what is still largely recognized as the pinnacle of the late 1990’s, early 2000’s online FPS gaming genre.
But despite all this, having ridden the frantic wave of gaming scene evolution as far as it could muster to propel us, we now generally all find ourselves in a much less positive internet gaming existence than the one we expected to finish in when we all started out…
Our journey led us through FPS evolution to a point of near crystalline perfection, before confounding us with a startling array of choice, born of diversity, and the growing ability of the community modification scene to realise their ambition-fuelled dreams. It then dazzled us with technological breakthrough, and broke our bank balances as an entire industry built itself around the increasingly prevalent desire for bigger and better graphics engines… only to then sap the ground beneath us down into the sticky quagmire that is commercial distillation when that very same hardware industry made mass-market appeal viable, causing the eventual disillusion, and disenchantment that moved many of us to slip from the FPS genre altogether.
Which led those of us still willing into the flourishing new world of MMOs, through stages of wonderment and discovery, of aspiration and sleep-deprivation, only to dump us back where we left off, with more disillusion and disenchantment as we realised that much of what glittered in that ‘adventure-filled’ world was not gold after all. Then, having been sucked into the console industry we’d all pledged never to step foot in, by way of the ‘almost a PC’ next-generation boom, we’re now experiencing the exact same cycle we did with the true PC software industry itself, leading us to once again gravitate back toward our roots, wondering why the fuck we left them in the first place…
Yes ladies and gentlemen, after 8 and a half years of having been constantly pushed toward something that was almost always not ‘more,’ we’re all back playing Quake 3, and all similarly perplexed by the state of modern gaming, and the series of events that created it :p
It’s odd to think that when I started this site in 2002, I’d have come full circle by 2011, with not much to show for my time. Certainly the process has led me back to my spiritual roots, however, and now rather than the hours and hours of Clan Arena/Rocket Arena and public CTF that I used to veg my free time away with, I’m now writing, drawing, and immersing myself in the foreign culture that largely gave birth to the world we’ve spent these 8 and a half years embroiled in.
So it struck me as undeniably sensible, a few days ago when I looked at the state of the site and the almost-achieved filespace cap, that it was time to hit the big red ‘reset’ button, and distil my online presence back down to what truly matters. There’s a lot of gaming history and memories now gone with the news wipe I’ve just actioned, but by the same token, too much of what was there is now a broken, and faded memory. Too many of the MMO companies mentioned have left us jaded and bitter since those ‘golden days’ of heady ignorance to deserve more free publicity, and too many of the FPS organizations and leagues discussed in the early days have collapsed into nothingness, with the many, many of the match demos I used to archive, in many cases, now no longer even playable, due to the software redundancy of their respective clients.
So here we are, back to scratch. Quake 3 CPM, music, art, writing. Welcome to the second generation of ninemil.com, and in a week when new-wave ‘tools’ such as facebook set about deleting and archiving well-established, and very much active communities en-mass, without a whim or a care, let’s hope this site once again provides the flawlessly reliable backbone it always has in the past.
Thank you to everyone still here after all this time. Your presence along the way made this heady experience all the more richer ^^
