Thread: Player History
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Old 27th May 2002, 20:16     #79
OR10N
 
Holy crap Orion's complete (?) TF history, including some NOLAG history and mapmaking trivia

First post to the TF forum in years, and only because I feel compelled to, for some strange reason - there'll be no big 'TF comeback' for Orion I'm afraid

Bear with me if the chronological timeline jumps all over the place. Oh, and this is gonna be one mutha of a post, so skip it if you really must

Anyway - re the topic, I started playing TF around early 98 (exact date unknown), thanks to Mr. Manson (now known as Necrolust) who hooked me up with the necessary files for Quake, which I'd scored myself a copy of about mid 97. Prior to TF, I played quite a bit of QWDM on the Prosper server.

The first TF class I started playing as was medic, and that would be my primary class for the rest of my TF career. I also played a bit of engineer and scout, but none of the other classes really appealed to me as much as medic.

The early days were a bit hazy for me, but I remember playing on Games3 beside and against such names as Gib2bitS, Warn1ght, Hellhound (aka vivisect), Sgt. Winky (aka Yogi Bear), Silva, spyda, Insanity, inertia, Bushwally, the mighty TTTT (under one of his other aliases back then), Kill_kenny (aka Firestorm) and a few others, including Atomic (Insanity's brother) who was leader of QoD, the clan I joined. I didn't know it at the time but I would eventually go on to meet most of the people I played beside online at NOLAG.

Ah yes - QoD. I led that for a month or so after Atomic handed over the leadership to me, then disbanded it (can't remember the exact reason why), would have been about mid 98. QoD was the first and last clan that I'd be in to last more than a month at the most, I never pegged myself as a clansman and most of my TF days were spent clanless. I had brief appearances in ID, Mj12, CCC and one or two others after that, and I think I may have slutted on occasion. The most notable thing I ever did as part of a clan was to record the X-es vs COM final for the Scorched Earth competition when I was in ID (I recorded one team, Silva recorded the other).

After disbanding QoD, I started expanding my Quake mapping skills and attempted to build my first TF map, Callisto, which started off as a random jumble of rooms and then slowly grew into a decently-themed map over the next few months as I got better at mapmaking. After I hit a massive creative block I pretty much stopped building Callisto and it was never to see the light of day, but I have a few of the builds backed up on CD somewhere.

During this time I continued playing TF on the NZ servers, mainly World-Net which had sprung up sometime in 98 (it had teamfrags, woo!). For me, TF reached a 'peak' between 98 and 99, and I enjoyed playing the classic maps such as sewer1, rock2, demoz2a, z7 etc.

Silva, or Insanity, or someone, suggested that I could build a replica of 2fort5 as my next project and so 2fort0rz was born (the name was a combination of '2fort', and 'orz' - which was a shortened version of my nick at the time). Work on this map progressed well, and halfway through I retextured it with a new textureset reminiscent of sewer1. However, towards the end of the project I found that I couldn't fit both bases in as the total length exceeded 8000 units. Someone else (Razzimatazz I think) suggested that I turn it into a defence-offence map, and after more editing and tweaking, 'fort0rz - the infiltration' v1.0 was released on 12th July 1999. Version 2.0 was released on 22nd August, with many tweaks in gameplay and construction, most notably the new water entrances and darker feel. Slime managed to get it on the World-Net server rotation and the rest was history. There were a couple of reviews of the map done locally as well as internationally and they were pretty good, so I was stoked.

About the time I was wrapping up fort0rz, a few of us started discussing new map ideas on the undernet #NZTF channel run by Shooman. From these ideas and countless other suggestions (a few of which were contributed by the enigmatic 'female' NZTFer 'Zinya'), 'The Machine' was born (named after the Pink Floyd song). Work on the new map started in about February of 1999. The first early alpha was released in September. Everyone seemed to like it so I kept working, and released the beta on October 2, which featured much of the red base. To keep my mind active I also made a small sniper wars map, 'FOV Forts', released on 12th November.

By the time I left for the States in December I didn't have much left to do apart from make sure the entities were all working correctly, and I finally got all these working a few days after arriving back home in late January 2000.

(You guys still with me? Good, coz there's more reading to be done, hehehe...)

While all this was going on, tongues began to wag about a regular (or otherwise) TF lan, riding on the success of Kai's lan, BlamLAN and others. Corrupt, Mr. Manson/Necrolust, Loony, Fanatic, BentBob (now known as EB), Cerbius and myself would have been the original instigators of the idea, and we started looking at a few different venues - finally settling on Corrupt's dad's place in Parau (since sold). Silva provided us with the name - NOLAG, BentBob provided us with some network gear, and the first event debuted on 31st July 1999 with 15 attendees, running overnight to the next day. NOLAGs 2, 3 and 4 took place roughly every 2 months after that in the same location. The events attracted many TFers from around the country (!) and I was fortunate enough to meet such famous names as Kill_kenny/Firestorm, Vortex, Kahn, Chopper, Bogaan, Marku$, Jimhend, Blam, Destroyer, Shoyu, Warnight, Larry, BladeStorm, Hellhound/vivisect et al.

It was at NOLAG 4 that one of the most intense and nail-biting TF Blue vs Red matches I'd ever been in was played - I still have Bogaan's demo. To this day it was probably THE best match I'd ever been in, right down to the frantic shouting and cursing as Red capped at the last second to win rock2, 21-19

For NOLAG 5, we moved a few k's up the road to the Laingholm hall as the Parau house was in the process of renovation by then. NOLAG 6 debuted on 25th June 2000, almost a full year after the original event, and featured an even bigger location - Glen Eden Intermediate School - as well as a change in direction. Gone was the 'closed-group-of-mates' feeling, we introduced memberships, opened the doors to everyone and anyone who wanted to come along, and the multiplayer focus had well and truly shifted away from TF to that love-it-hate-it-or-both Half-Life mod, CS, by then.

NOLAGs 6-10 still managed to attract some pretty big TF names though - Avatar, TTTT, Inertia, Halfpint, Hellstorm and even Jin managed to grace its presence during that time.

The twelfth and final NOLAG event (there was no NOLAG 11) was held at the end of September 2001, at Laingholm hall. It was to be a 'true' NOLAG event only in name, with many of the attendees from the 'old days' (and co-founder Corrupt) not even present, having since moved on.

Anyway... back to the original point, which was my player history

By the time I released 'The Machine' on 30th January 2000, the TF 'scene' had withered to the point that the people who had contributed so many ideas to the map in the first place, fed up of all the crap, had either moved on to other games or had disappeared completely. The result was a pretty disappointing response from what was left of the NZTF community, with many people finding it way too hard to play properly (and the Aussies hated it for this very reason)

There was a lot of clan rivalry and bitterness going around too, which I managed to stay out of for the most part... thanks to being clanless.

By the time NOLAG 5 rolled around in April 2000, I remember the majority of people, including myself, had stopped playing altogether, including most of the core group of people who had been at NOLAG 1 only 6 months prior. Ironically, it was at NOLAG 5 that a group of us sat down and reminisced about the 'goode olde days of TF' for the better part of an hour.

It got so bad that I remember at NOLAG 8 someone started a stupid rumour that Slime was coming all the way from Wanganui to bash Halfpint or Kahn or someone, which obviously never happened.

It was about this time I stopped posting on the TF forums

My TF 'career' was all but over by the time 2001 rolled around, NOLAG was by now pretty much a CS/TFC/Q3A event, the three TF maps I'd released had pretty much sunk into oblivion, and the many friends I had made during my time playing TF didn't really care for the game anymore.

I spent most of my online time either idling in #lah, #bro or #vnv (#NZTF was long gone by this time) or playing CS/Q3A. In total I think I only played four or five games of TF during 2001, and none of them lasted longer than three minutes before I left the server

It's now 2002 and I haven't touched TF at all this year! I'm surprised at the number of people that still play the game though, I suppose I was wrong in thinking that TF would die by the end of 2000

I still keep in touch with many of the people I started playing TF with, but in turn there are many others that I've lost contact with - Fanatic, Corrupt, Firestorm, Bladestorm, Avatar, Warnight, Atomic, Razzimatazz, to name but a few - and if you guys or anyone else who knew me from the old TF days are still around, give me a yell sometime!

Blahhh. *relaxes sore fingers*

So there you have it, my entire TF life history, probably missing a few snippets here and there but this is all I could remember. If you managed to read all of what I wrote... you're either real bored or real interested!

Last edited by OR10N : 27th May 2002 at 20:31.
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