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| Re: Halo - a look back over seven years | |
| Posted By: BerserkerBarage | Date: 11/18/08 12:48 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: Halo - a look back over seven years (DirkGently) For me, HaloCE started when I was a sophomore in undergrad. I was living in a 3-story townhouse with 3 other guys and we had weekly HCE LANs at my house every Wednesday night. We were CTF junkies. We played hour long games on Blood Gulch, HEH, and Sidewinder. Oh delicious Sidewinder. We typically started at 7 or 8pm and would go on to the early hours of the morning. I can honestly say that my grades on my Tues/Thurs classes suffered tremendously from my love for HCE. I can remember staying up all night with one of the guys I lived with and play through campaign on Legendary. We had everything memorized. We could tell you the enemy and weapon placement spawns on pretty much every campaign map. Our LANs grew bigger. Shortly after HCE came out I spent a whoppin' $2k on a 65" ToshibaHDTV so that we could play HaloCE the "right way". Another guy moved in with us bringing his 60" MitsubishiHDTV which was promptly put downstairs in the basement. But 4 vs 4 isn't enough. Oh no, not with Halo. So 2 more 32" TVs were bought and paired with each big screen. So it started the rivalry. Upstairs in the living room was Red Team and downstairs in the basement was Blue Team. This way you could organize as a team without worrying about the other team overhearing. And screen-watching was halted. Hell, we even got walkie-talkies so we could talk to each other instead of shouting down the stairs (thankfully we never got an eviction notice). My one good friend Allen and I were now forbidden to be on the same team because of our mastery of the M6D. We became team captain. He was Red and I was Blue. We got to know sooo many people that even to this day we don't know their real names, we only know them as their HCE Gamertags. Then we discovered the wonders of XBC (or Xbox Connect) and found out that we could play HCE against people online pretty much anytime we wanted to. It was a wonderful time and my undergrad grades went down even more. I can remember sitting one day in the commuter-student lounge on campus and someone was playing the second level (Halo) of HCE. Without being able to see his computer screen I could tell exactly where he was and was able to direct him to where he needed to go to meet up with the rendezvous teams. That's how in-depth the game had sucked me in. I could essentially play Halo in my sleep. I got into playing some competitive HCE around Ohio and won a few tournaments both at the University I went to and at OSU. I can remember getting invited to play on dorm HCE teams because since I didn't live in the dorm I was essentially a "free-agent". For anyone who knows me now they'd probably be shocked that at one time I would have been considered a "competitive gamer". So maybe you've heard about this little game called Halo 2 that came out a few years later on. For us, this was a tremendous opportunity. A chance to get to put our LANs out in public and see if we were the only people that were this "Halo-crazy". We reserved copies of H2 at a local Gamestop and convinced them to let us run an extension cord from their store to the parking lot. We set up 4 TVs and 4 Xboxs in the back of a pickup truck and drove over at 5pm (hey, it gets dark early in Ohio) to set everything up. We sat there for 7 hours in 40F letting everyone who was waiting for H2 to come out to get in on the LAN. We got XBL gamertags and played with the very same people a week after the game launched (hey, we gotta see how the story goes first!). Fast forward to August of 2008. I'm flying across the entire US out to Seattle for PAX '08. I'm excited about the opportunity to sleep on the floor of a hotel room that Recon Number 54 was gracious enough to let me crash at. If he hadn't, I would have missed some of my most cherished memories in my life. Speaking of PAX and cherished memories. On the Thursday we arrived we had the opportunity to go over to the Studios. Yeah, Bungie Studios. It was amazing and while we tried to play it as cool as we could I'm sure Jerome and the security team could tell we were insanely excited to be there. The doors open from the studios out to the lobby (where we all had our faces plastered against their trophy cases like little kids) and out walked Stoshy and RunningTurtle. Gossett was extremely nice but informed us that he had to get back to fixing whatever Achronos had recently screwed up. But Stoshy and Mr. Hand said they'd go for coffee with us. It was amazing to just sit down and talk about some things about the inner-workings of Bungie with people that get to be there every day. They go back to the office and we get ready for the beginning of PAX the next day. So Friday rolls around and it's the first day of PAX. We're over at the Convention Center when Recon spots this ginormous behemoth of a man. Apparently this Paul Bunyan-esque person goes by the name Louis Wu. Wow! Can this really be the fabled Louis Wu? He's got on a ODST shirt! OH EMMM GEE! I think it is. That one just the start of an amazing weekend where I got to meet people I felt I knew through my experience with Halo that I've never met before in my life. Talking with Sketch, Shishka, Stoshy, the McLees', Kuniklo, Marty, Mike (RM), and everyone else was a great time. Add in talking to Wu and the rest of the moderators and it was an amazing time. It's been a long way in 7 years. If you would have told me back then that I would have been flying out to Seattle to hang out with the people that made the game I wouldn't have believed you. I just wish I could have gone to one of the infamous Wu LANs. You had me at "I need a weapon!" ~B.B.
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