In Part 1 of the article, that you can find here(link), we talked about my start in the world of Blizzard Entertainment, particularly my first Blizzard game Starcraft and my first attempt at becoming a progamer in Warcraft 3.
Let us continue exploring the far reaches of my memory castle.
I wanted to become a progamer.
Of course to become a pro player you needed the ability to play online, which I did not have because of the fact that I did not have legitimate copy of the game. When The Frozen Throne expansion was announced, at that moment in my mind a thought flashed “Maybe I wait until the expansion gets released and then become pro?” I thought I would have enough money to own both at that point.
At last that time came and the expansion was released. By then I had a job and had money to get both games with actual CD-Keys!
The way I went about it is this:
At the time I didn’t drive I was just below the driving age limit, so I convinced my mom to go to the mall to buy herself something and get me the game. Notice how I didn’t even bother going there with her, I just wrote down the name of the game I wanted and gave her the note and sent her off on an adventure! I was every moms dream kid at that age… Nostalgia glasses are still working so well for me.
My mom comes back from the store with a mint copy of The Frozen Throne. I was so excited, this game was my chance to fame and glory! Before all of that could happen I need to once again beat the campaign. You know to learn the races… duh. I wasn’t some scrub that cared about the story…
A little side story that happened when I got the game that evening. While mom was out getting me the game, I was in a chat room talking to some strangers that I considered my friends about the fact that I was getting this game. They were all very jealous of me. When I got the game and I was telling them I was installing it and all that good stuff, one of them asked me if I could let him have the CD-Key so that he could also play while I was offline. Luckily for me I activated the CD-Key prior to my excitement getting the better of me. Because I did give him the CD-Key, the problem is it did not work because it was already active. But at the time I was so sure he was going to only play when I was offline that it didn’t even flag the situation in my head. Now that I think back if the roles were reversed I would not play only when the other person was offline. I would make sure I was always online so that the other person didn’t get in on my game time. I only realized this many years later… Human nature huh?
Needless to say I started to play the storyline, and what a story it was… To this day I think the story of Arthas Menethil his change for good to bad is the best example of Blizzard writing. After his ascent to The Frozen Throne, I was emotionally invested in his story. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Frozen Throne was the second game where the bad guy won the day. First being Starcraft, at least to my knowledge. No matter how much I wanted to know what happened next there was no next expansion. There were rumors at the time of something big coming in the Warcraft universe but nothing concrete.
So after I have calm down from the shock to my system of Arthas winning after all the efforts that were put in place to stop him, I moved on to play online.
I moved on to start my competitive rise in the Esports scene. I practiced hours upon hours of WC3. Participated in battle.net automated tournaments. I even signed up for some tournaments outside of battle.net. Little did I know I had zero capacity for RTS competitive play. Being a kid however it doesn’t quite compute as well as it does now. I never got good at WC3, like not even close. I could not understand what I was doing wrong or how to get better. After a couple months I gave up and moved on to other games.
However the story of Arthas Menethil stayed with me and I kept an eye out on the gaming scene to see what Blizzard was up to it.
So that was my first experience in the Azeroth world. I didn’t go into the game for the lore or the story, but the story was the only thing that had a long lasting effect on me. It would be years from that point that I got to actually experience Azeroth and all of its beautiful lore and stories and characters in a game that would change the MMO scene forever: World of Warcraft.
In the next article I would like to explore my first experience in an MMO. This may come as a surprise to some but my first MMO wasn’t World of Warcraft. Yes, I know it’s shocking, but MMOs did exist before WoW burst onto the scene. More on that in the next article.
Leave a Reply