I’m late to this thread and don’t meet the age requirement (yay!) but I will be sixty in March. First off, I want to thank all of you Older Timers for making this disabled Old Timer feel like the kid here. While I try to act with some measure of maturity, I do think growing up is overrated.
I want to say to everyone who posted that I enjoyed reading your abbreviated gaming and life histories. I could relate to a lot of what I read. Some of you I know at least in passing so I was especially interested in your stories but I did read every post and identified with probably every one of them in some way or another.
I also date back to pumping quarters into machines at a bowling alley with pool tables, pinball machines and several machines the size of a pinball machine with something truly amazing called video games. I distinctly remember playing pong, asteroids (my favorite) and Pacman.
My first computer was something I bought at Radio Shack that needed to be connected to a cassette tape player and I forget what else. I do recall that I had to type in programs to make it do anything although I think it may have come with some on cassette tapes. This was fun to mess with but what really hooked me was when a close friend purchased an IBM PC-XT clone (remember when they were called clones?). He also bought Lotus 1-2-3. At the time, I asked him why the heck he’d blow so much money for something that had no real usefulness aside of being a ridiculously expensive toy. A chemistry set would have been a lot cheaper. Remember those?
Anyway, it only took one session of me at the keyboard to hook me in to the magic there. As someone who at the time did home budgets on paper, the notion that I could change one number in January and see the results instantly reflected across years if I wanted to, was beyond belief. No more erasing and recalculating by hand! Wow!!! Then the real fun began. I discovered the macro language. The rest is history as they say. I left a career in nursing to pursue a degree in computer science. I went on to work in the area of speech recognition where I had the opportunity to be surrounded by a group of truly brilliant people and learn from them. There I also did work for both IBM and Microsoft. During that time, myself and a group of friends discovered the incredible fun of playing a new game called DOOM that we could play together over the company LAN after hours while on a conference call with each other for voice communication since we were spread around the building.
I will never forget the night a group of grown men all walked out of there, hanging our heads and talking about our shared fear and dread of facing the music when we got home to our wives because we’d been playing DOOM multiplayer until midnight I think it was. That was my first exposure to playing a computer game with other people at a time when I think we did have 56k modems and bulletin boards but something like DOOM you got as a shareware disc with a magazine like Compute! Remember that? Anyone remember reading BYTE or the early PC Magazine with Seymour and Dvorak?
I eventually went on to do consulting and was then picked up by a process control corporation where I worked for years before a terrible illness ended all of that. I am doing fine but I miss doing what I loved and the income that came with it was pretty nice too. I live a far more humble existence today but I can tell you a good lesson can be learned in all of that. Material things have no lasting value at all. It’s the family and friends in your life aside of basic necessities we all need to live that count. Anything else is just icing for our cakes. So I count my blessings rather than bemoan my losses and that leads me to a good point about OTG which I count as one of those blessings for more than a decade now.
OTG has been like a window, a connection to the outside world for me who rarely leaves my home. I live alone with my kittens but I don’t feel alone usually. I can login to any number of great games, including stuff not on the big list, and immediately find kindred souls in my own age group to have fun with. I was drawn to our guild back when Vanguard launched I think it was based solely at first on the motto I read. Having seen my fair share of drama in two different hard core EverQuest raiding guilds, I was ready to retire from that and excited about the idea of an older group of players who play for fun first and foremost. For more than a decade I found this to be consistently true. Do we have our moments as a diverse group of human beings? Sure we do but this guild was setup from the outset to promote harmony and limit issues. A great deal of credit is due to the founders and those who have ever since volunteered their own personal time to manage the guild all the way down to each chapter officer. They keep this big boat on course and do a really great job of it too.
I have a way of wandering off and forgetting what I started with as I write walls of text that exceed typical forum posts. Sorry about that! On a bright note, I lurk more than I write. It keeps me out of trouble! I guess I just want to thank everyone for the fun and the community we have here. It takes everyone for this to work so well as it does.
I have played original EQ with OTG years ago with a small group of great people I miss. I think that came about when Vanguard was more than my system could handle at the time. Since then I have dabbled in DDO and LoTRO and enjoyed both but naturally wound up playing EQ2 and spending a lot of time there with a great group years ago and another one more recently. I bought World of Warcraft at launch (still have my original boxed copy!) but I didn’t actually start playing until just prior to the game’s first expansion which I really loved and had tons of fun with. I have probably played WoW, primarily on the glorious Horde side more than any other game over the years with OTG, taking breaks to do other things but then always returning to my favorite. I like the Alliance too, despite the gnomes and silly goats but really I just play Alliance to spy for the Horde. Speaking of which, I will finally finish by saying,
FOR THE HORDE!!!
