Due to the relative anonymity of the internets, some participants in flame wars act like they have 12″ steel cocks.
I know that sounds crude, but if you have ever spent even a short amount of time on a forum or USENET group, you will invariably come across the various archetypes illustrated in Flame Warriors.
In reality, despite the plethora of material available online, arguing in these venues is generally a waste of time. For instance, even if you believe your argument is cogent, kosher and filled with sexiness, at the end of the day your enemy is probably a 14 year old kid that plays on the Xbox all day in his parents basement. And thus, you will be griefed, trolled, and Godwined ad nauseum. Or as the eponymous site is called: SomethingAwful will undoubtedly occur.
In fact, I think the JRR Special Olympics photo sums up just about every debate that has traveled through the series of tubes.
With that said, let us turn to an odd brouhaha: John Romero versus Mike Wilson both of ION Storm fame (not to be confused with id).
I’m not going to really discuss the debate because (1) it is now over, (2) the colorful commentators in the various comments sections have much better one-liners than I can find from bathroom walls and (3) it is a fight between two video game developers. Lame.
Setting the stage
For some good background on what the two guys are bickering about I recommend perusing the book Masters of Doom and an older article from the Dallas Observer appropriately titled Stormy Weather.
I should also mention that two of my high school friends used to visit the ION offices back in the day and even played against the developers; let’s call them W&TT. They are brothers about the same age as my older brother and I. And based on their own observations and experiences, the info gleaned from the article and subsequent book are dead on. Mismanagement, egos, and shoddy work ethic was more abundant than an STD at Planned Parenthood.
The one time I personally met John Romero was at a large public LAN exhibition in the Spring of 2000 in downtown Dallas. The key event at the gaming party (yea, that is very dorky sounding) was the public unveiling of the hyped action game: Daikatana. John, who still had his iconic long hair, was its lead developer and participants at the event would have a chance to play against him in a deathmatch.
A friend of mine spotted John and Stevie Case (his girlfriend at the time) and we asked him to autograph the billete program we received at the door. Also standing next to John was a fellow by the name of Angel Munoz who is the creator of the Cyberathletic Professional League which managed the whole event.
Angel quipped that John should get used to having people ask him for autographs, because to quote Ron Burgundy: he was kind of a big deal.
We all parted and seemingly enjoyed the rest of the weekend festivities. As an aside the Tribes tournament my duct-tape “clan” played in was the highlight of my weekend as we didn’t suck nearly as bad as we thought. Nor did I.
At one point I did attempt to speak with Angel about an endeavor some of my friends were working on called AdreniLAN. It was essentially a game-oriented PC Bang placed along a busy freeway in North Dallas. It received its name largely through the efforts of a Vietnamese friend of mine who had also coordinated an audacious undertaking the previous year; let us call him HN.
HN and I were part of a pilot network engineering program in high school sponsored by Cisco. We spent three semesters training and studying for the CCNA (by and large it was a waste of time). At the tail end of our scholastic tenure, HN and several of his technical-minded friends put together a large LAN party in the high school cafeteria called AdreniLAN.
They procured switches, routers, and hubs capable of hosting/transporting several hundred participants. They had a dozen or so dedicated game servers, a redundant power system and even coordinated large pizza deliveries. These were no small feats for a group of highschool seniors that were strapped for cash. They even got Tiger Distributing and a couple other sponsors to throw in prizes (like computers and various accessories).
While there were a slew of various games being played over the network, Quake 2 was the game played in the main tournament. While I considered a number of my friends fantastic at the game (primarily because they kicked my ass), everyone was bested by legendary gamer Fatal1ty who eventually won the computer and of course, all of the hot chicks.
I mention all of this because when I attempted to speak with Angel at the CPL event a year later, he shrugged me off. As a side note, he is the proprietor of an online gaming site called Adrenaline Vault (like the names?).
While I never saw the email myself, Angel apparently had contacted one of my friends about the name HN had used for the PC Bang. Apparently Angel was not too thrilled or supportive, hence his apparent annoyance of my queries. And yet another friend (mormon!) of mine had also mentioned that when soliciting support for the high school event the year before, Angel was not too happy about the original AdreniLAN either. Maybe everyone just caught him on a bad hangover day.
Postmortem
Despite the fact that 8 years have gone by and I live half-way around the world, after seeing the John and Mike debate, it is nice to see that some things never change. Quite comforting.
A quick run-down of where they all are now:
- Angel was superficially a dick, though some of my friends that still attend those CPL events say he has become less socially retarded
- Daikatana was a financial fiasco and impossible to beat without cheat codes (the game design was incomplete)
- Stevie Case jumped the shark by posing in Playboy and broke up with John
- John, has since worked for numerous companies at various technical levels, yet never achieving the fame he had a decade ago
- AdreniLAN, the PC Bang, despite becoming an official CPL test center, folded after a couple of years
- HN, an autodidact, now works as a graphic artist in California
- W&TT were smart and chose not to go to college; their geek prowess paid off and they not only live debt free but rake in a good chunk of change at a dotcom
- Only 2 of the 20 Cisco participants became CCNA certified, I was not caliente enough to be one of them. The program was scrubbed several years later.
- And most importantly, playing video games is still the leading cause of virginity. Don’t let basement virginitus happen to your friends.