veteran gamers? 30+?

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nocturne7saint
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veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by nocturne7saint »

So I am 40, I was wondering how many of you are 30 years old and up?
veteran gamers born into gaming, got to see the beginnings, and some of the golden years of gaming.

so if you are a veteran gamer, what got you into gaming? what were your favorite games growing up?
and what do you play now besides UO?
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Papertiger »

I was there right at the beginning, and UO was the only multiplayer game around. I am in the UK and the internet was a dial up and cost 1 pound per hour, which was not cheap for the time . I use to have a pot next to my pc saving money to have that extra hour to play. To me UO was a magical world and I was amazed to be able to talk to players from around the world. When I played we did not have the land of Trammel , it was just Felucca where you where no where safe and had to watch yourself sitting at the bank for thief's stealing anything they could out of your bag, or notorious PKS running round killing and looting players. It was also a time where houses where fetching crazy amount of money on ebay.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Desenex »

I'm 70 years old. We didn't have video games when I was growing up. Board games and card games was about it. I got bit by the gaming bug in the mid eighties when I convinced my wife to let me buy a Commodore 64. I loved the game 'Archon' but usually got beat by my son. Also liked 'Attack of the Mutant Camels'. I eventually got a PC where our favorite game was 'Red Storm Rising'. When UO hit the scene (in the late nineties?) we played on a private shard called Flint Hills. We liked the shard and the people but technical problems resulted in everyone having to start from scratch a couple of times. After two years and the third restart, we moved on and didn't look back. Somewhere along the line we played a lot of X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Balance of Power. After a long absence from gaming my son found Excelsior a few years ago while looking for a shard my grandsons could play on. It's going on three years now and we're still here.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Tribecca »

I was introduced to gaming by my children through Diablo. I don't remember how I found Ultima Online, but it was the Third Dawn release that I came in on.

I remember when the FC1, FCR 2 ring was a highly sought after item. LOL. I remember camping at South Brit bank, waiting for Power Hour so I could get that last .01 skill gain to reach 100 in tailoring. Every town had people buying and selling at the town's bank area. Also, you could have a vendor at your house on the steps. It was fun running around finding new player vendors and marking runes at the good ones. Looted items' stats were hidden until you used an Item ID wand. Those wands were valuable.

I also remember my first Felucca scam. I thought I was being gated to a house for sale for 100,000 gp. The guy gated me to the house, walked me into the house, and killed my character. I was new, so what did I know.

The first time I died at the hands of a MOB was a with gargoyle. Reapers used to scare me as well, until I became a stronger character.

I had a house somewhere Northwest of Brit, and did end up selling it on ebay for $100 when I quit. My son also had a house hat sold on ebay for $110. Golems had just came out when I left OSI. Thanks for the topic. Nice memories. :nod:
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Zanzi »

For me started with Atari 2600? I cannot recalled for sure. I have 4 other siblings. We would take turn playing pac-man and asteroids. During the summer, the game would be on from 7am to 9pm. Eventually moved to nintendo. First online game was UO back in 1996? So ya 52 yrs old here.
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nocturne7saint
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by nocturne7saint »

when i was 6, my mother got me the Magnavox oddesy. my favorite games on there were pick axe pete and munchers.
then I got a Nintendo not but a year or so later.

snes was my favorite console. I got into final fantasy 3 (6), earthbound, soul blazer, illusion of Gaia. act raiser etc.
secret of evermore and secret of mana.

so many great rpgs on that system.

got my first pc when i was 18, played a lot of diablo and starcraft.
then somewhere around 2004-2005 i think was when my friend got me into uo free shards.
correct me if uo free shards were not out then, my memory is fuzzy about that.
can't rememeber the name of the server i started on for the life of me though.
i know i played a bit on demise a while after i started playing.
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Cerrera
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Cerrera »

33 here, started of course with relatives which had sega etc... spent many time at internet cafe's , Loved one chinesse style game on ps, which had reallistic factor, that if you get injured , you couldn't move that limb normally, and when ran to end of map, you just ran in to another. Besides uo of course loved Diablo2, Red alert2, Warcraft(cannot recall version) think i started my internet cafe's possession with Solders of fortune Unreal and Quake when was kid.. Think at that time Uo were first really deep made game which offered never ending story/adventure which offers many roads , what i was seeking.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Jebidia »

So, 52 here. Old school player (I still push buttons, no scripting). Been playing from almost start up. Like others there was only one shard. Then went to 2. Then moved to the AOL Legends server....Yep...I am old.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by ButteryBiscuits »

My dad worked for IBM when they first came out with the personal computer. Had a black screen with green dots that made letters but not pictures. 5 1/2" floppy drive and dial up service but no internet, just the chat boards or college servers. There was a game that was all the rage that came out.... had to tell it what to do and it would respond. Walk into the room.... you have walked into a large room. Look at the room... the room appears empty except for an old broken chest. Look in the chest.... you are too far away to reach the chest. Walk over to the chest.... etc. King's Quest I think? Can't remember for sure. Eventually there were "real" monitors with pictures and laughable animations. Good times. Good times.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by sarmatian »

I started in very late 80-ties with C128D
First multi cpu computer.

Sid Meir's Pirates
Laser Squad
Bard's Tale
Ultima I

Then on PC Panzer General (and other from the series), X-com, ADOM, Nethack, Civilization I & II
later Heroes III, Civilization 5, Flight Simulator
then Total War series
lately UOEX (too old computer to launch modern games)
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Orionesss »

37 yo here. UO gamer since day 1 of AOS in 2003. Back then we didnt even have Razor, so I've been using UO built-in macros, sticking toothpicks on the keyboard to macro skills :)
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Geriatric »

39 here..
my first gaming experience was an atari 2600 playing endless hours of kung fu master and frogger in the late 80s

eventually got a sega mega drive (genesis) end up playing countless hours of sonic, altered beast, powermonger, desert strike

cant remember what year it was that i got my first PC im guessing maybe around 96, i had a game on it called the incredible machine, that was fun untill i had defeated it a few times but i played alot of hours in wizardry 5 - heart of the maelstrom

i played a little bit of UO at my cousins house when there was no such thing as trammel but playing dial up from australia to a US server was just pointless, so that got packed in pretty quick
i picked it back up again when i heard they released a server in australia called Oceania, played there for many years, i ran multiple accounts so i had characters for different scenarios, tamers/bards/crafters/treasure hunters and pvp characters
there was no razor or UO steam, but there was UO assist which was a god send
even met my wife playing on oceania,
started to lose interest in UO after age of shadows came out and by the time the samurai empire was released that was kind of a coffin nail for me
pvp had become heavily item based, whoever had the best items won, it wasnt about skill and guile anymore
crafting had all but been destroyed, there was no regular sales of GM quality armour or weapons, it was all about specialised runics
so with some of the more enjoyable parts of the game having disappeared, i like so many migrated my way towards world of warcraft
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Deorum »

Command and Conquer and Starcraft were my online intro. Never cared much for Quake and the shooters. Eventually I stumbled across Diablo 1, not too long before the Diablo II release. I found a guild in D2 (which gameplay really only lasted through that summer) before the guildmates turned me on to UO. I purchased UO:Ren and absolutely fell in love with the game. Played on Baja from probably 2000-2006 or so and then look a hiatus. I felt nostalgic in 2012 and discovered UO:Excelsior and have been playing here off and on since then. While the customization of this shard is awesome, there is a part of me that occasionally does miss the limitations of the OSI shards such as 700 skill cap, no relayers, limited housing, vendors only in your house/guildhouse, etc. It was always fun trying to balance skills and stats to ensure you could still use recall scrolls adequately, etc. I think it made achieving things in game much more difficult and rewarding. However, on the flipside I love having a fairly well-geared character now where I can solo explore areas that I never would have come close to soloing back on OSI.
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by +Colibri »

I'd guess that most of us are 30+ :D
It's nice to read all these stories.

I'm 37, I think (stopped counting soon after 30).
My first interaction with computers was at about 8-10 years old, I remember going to a computer course in my school as an extra curricular activity, we were learning about the differences between a 5¼-and 3½ inch floppy drives. Don't write with a pencil on the 5¼ one! Also played some various video games like GrandPrix and I think it was Jungle Strike. We couldn't afford a computer at the time, or well it was expensive and you had to know someone who knew a little bit about computers to install the OS and give you a few floppies with games on them. My uncle also had a computer, and I remember things like: Wacky Wheels, a lot by Apogee (bio menace?), and Geriatric thanks for mentioning Incredible Machines, I just remembered that one. I just checked it out, the graphics are worse than I remember hehe.

*goosebumps* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfzg2vuqia0

Dad bought a 486 with a turbo button. At the time, we thought that the computer should be left out of turbo for most of the time, and then turbo enabled only when you're working on intense tasks. Later I found that you're supposed to "turn off turbo" to switch from 100Mhz to 16Mhz just for legacy games, but I remember that some games had an issue, that with turbo enabled they were way too fast, and at turbo disabled they were very slow. Supaplex, Amiga Volleyball (emulated/ported, very basic graphics), Doofus

My first computer, well our family computer but I ended up using it, was a Celeron probably in the year 1998. I remember playing games such as Interstate 76, Age of Empires, Anno 1602, Theme Hospital, Fly!, Tomb Raider 2, Ignition, Unreal Tournament 99, Re-Volt... My mom was just clearing the basement the other day and brought me a bag of my old games - these are the ones I bought, but I also got some pirated ones. I remember upgrading from some basic graphics card to Voodoo2, and I was amazed about the smoke coming out of the rockets in Unreal Tournament.

Later on I got an AMD Athlon 2400, and that was the computer on which I started coding Excelsior on. I forgot which games exactly I played at the time, but I kinda ended up with playing a lot of Half Life 2 & sequels, TrackMania, Supreme Commander.

Back in 2002 a classmate invited me to check out UO on a freeshard called Zulu Hotel. Another classmate also played it - Morpheus (co-founder of the shard) and a couple of other friends. For some reason, Trinsic was our home town, that's why over here Trinsic has the vendorstones and raffle stones, kind of a secondary homebase of our shard. Then I didn't play for a while, but in 2005 I was trying to find a distraction from studying, started playing a bit on Metropolis shard... hardly gathered any gold before getting killed by PKs, so that was no fun. Then found Allure of the Unknown, where I thrived, and also applied for staff and was staff there for about 6 months. Me and Morpheus and a polish guy by the name of Lero had a small guild. And in January 2006 we started tinkering with RunUO and came to an idea we could make our own server, so we started something that was initially called "The Small Shard" but was then renamed a few months later to Excelsior - the name was Morpheus' idea.


The videogames from my basement:
my games.png
my games.png (564.57 KiB) Viewed 4956 times
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Re: veteran gamers? 30+?

Post by Dirtybook »

I don't have any interesting stories to tell here. I will be 43 on August the 8th of this year, and I have played 3 Online MMO games ever.. Built my first computer when I was 19. Have played & beat probably 350+ console games since around 1990. Past playing RPGs, flying shoot'em'ups, and racing games, I have no cool anecdotes on my years with computers. However, it is interesting to read what all of you have done. So I appreciate being able to read the experiences of others.

I can say, that my upbringing wasn't exactly pleasant, but the games where there for me to escape. I can remember days where I played Dragon Warrior 3 & 4 all day, just to get my characters to level 99. Then wake up at 2 in the morning in the middle of a field or a fight that was awaiting commands, because I feel asleep (on a school night). I am definitely glad I still have most of my consoles and games from the old days, and that there is still places like UOEX to play on. OSI is just to underpopulated. It is nice to come to a world where other people share the space. Even if you don't say much, or participate much with others.. That comfort level knowing other people are there, is what makes the server special.

Keep on with the stories guys. They are interesting.
Last edited by Dirtybook on Wed Jun 07, 2023 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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