So it all began the summer of ’97 when my cousin came across this game surfing the internet.  (My cousin lived in Taiwan but he and his family decided for him to enroll in my high school in America, he ended up only staying for one semester before heading back to Taiwan) Back then, the only game I played against other people on the computer was Warcraft 2, a game my cousin introduced me and taught me how to play.  He told me to come take a look at this new game he downloaded.  I went over to his monitor and saw a bunch of gray circles moving around slowly, firing lasers at each other.  The fact that he told me it was a multiplayer online game made it kind of cool; I envisioned the game to be like a multiplayer space invaders game or something.  I had no idea then what kind of mess I would be getting myself into when we took turns playing the game.  We kind of had a little competition and see who would be able to kill the most enemy ships before dying.  Needless to say, we both spent more time in the holding pen than out of the holding pen.  I believe there might have been only one map then, but I am not sure (five maps at the most).  I remember the map we played the most of when we first started out was what we call Battleground today.  I remember it was extremely crowded though, perhaps more than 10 people on a team in a little map like Battleground.  My memories of those early days on that map included our whole team getting demolished and pushed all the way back to our base, and Juan Valdez, the only person on our team worth a damn, valiantly fighting them off.  Other memories were of Access Denied camping at the southern end of the vertical bridge on Battleground and proclaiming every two minutes that it was his bridge and proceeded to kill off anyone trying to cross the bridge.  A lot of guys that day trying to cross the bridge got denied.  Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 

So I went downstairs to get some breakfast while my cousin played on, and when I was done eating, my cousin got all excited over the game.  He told me that the game is so much more fun if you grab the opponents flag and have the whole opposing team chase you.  We started playing the game off and on, and we found ourselves playing it when we got home from school as well.  The screen name I chose to use was Firestarter (I just bought the latest Prodigy CD at the time), and my cousin used ReXorD.  We were both kind of surprised by our sudden addiction to this game and started to tease each other and calling each other ARC addicts.  I guess it was just the fact that the game was simple to set up and hassle free, and we could enter and exit whenever we felt like it, that made it seem so appealing. 

The other thing was clans.  It kind of fascinated me, although I didn’t really understand the use of it.  It all started when I met someone called Laurie =CO= on a map.  She was basically being extremely stubborn and not dying, and killing anyone who got close to her.  I was one of her victims.  It almost became laughable how hard she was for me and anyone else on the map to kill her.  Now that I think back on it, she was playing the running game, and I would pitifully charge her because I wanted revenge for the times she killed me, only to end up dying again.  I asked her what the meaning of =CO= is.  It looked kind of ugly on her name.  She told me it was a clan.  Now, I’m thinking: “Ok just stick some weird symbols at the end of your name and call it a clan, what’s the purpose in that?  The game has no clan support that I am aware of, and anyone can join your clan whether you like it or not; all they have to do is put that same symbol by their name.” So logically, I asked to join anyway.  The notion of playing alongside an elite ARCer with a sense of camaraderie was just too appealing.  Surprisingly, she didn’t reject me on the spot.  It turns out she’s not the clan leader, and I’d have to talk to someone named OgreChow.  I didn’t really expect to see her much at all, in fact this might be the only time I would see her, so I didn’t really give too much thought about pursuing this =CO= clan if I couldn’t join on the spot and play with another clan member.  I gave my cousin his share of ARC time and challenged him to slay this Laurie girl, and he didn’t have any more success than I did.  Laurie was probably the first ARCer that really caught my attention just because she was so damn hard for me to kill. 

The next day my cousin found Laurie again in a game.  What a small community of addicts this ARC game has.  It turned out that wouldn’t be the last time either of us would see her either.  We suddenly had a whole new incentive to play ARC, and that was to try and kill Laurie as many times as we could.  Forget Attack Retrieve Capture, it was Attack Laurie Repeatedly.  Yea it was brutal.  We had fun though.  

My cousin and I actually started to get better at this game to the point where Laurie did not seem like a demigod anymore.  We started to notice miscellaneous CO members here and there, and they all seemed quite good.  We both decided to actively pursue membership to this clan.  This is around the time we were introduced to dueling on ARC.  We’d spend our time dueling COs, and we were actually good enough to make the duels quite competitive and even beat some COs.  Duels weren’t to five back then.  They were to whenever we felt like stopping.  So duels back then were actually quite long.  When my cousin dueled, he would sometimes tell me to play a few lives for him; I probably told him I was better than him at the time, but the truth was, we were both pretty close in skill.  I remembered one time I died when he told me to play for him, and he snatched the mouse back and berated me.  We just loved talking trash to each other about ARC.  I remembered dueling Jaster and losing in a relatively close match, dueling Cannon and winning,, and got beaten by Dartanion convincingly.  I believe my cousin had some competitive duels with SpiffyMan, losing to Jaster also, beating Cannon also, and didn’t have much luck with Dartanion either.  Me and my cousin both agreed that Dart was the hardest CO we’ve ever dueled.  What I remembered most about Dartanion, besides his great dueling skills was that whenever he gets frustrated in a game, he would log off Dartanion =CO= and log on as Dart is Pissed! and proceed to wreck havoc in games.  If that didn’t work, he would resort to Dart is VERY Pissed! It seemed like he would switch names every ten minutes.  He was quite a character.

I’m trying to write this history chronologically but I am not sure exactly where this upcoming incident fits in.  It was after about a month of experience of playing ARC under my belt, and suddenly this guy called Firestorm enters the game.  He claims that I stole his name and proceeded to bug me about it incessantly.  Apparently my Firestarter screen name was too similar to his Firestorm screen name.  I’ve never even seen this guy before and I thought he was a total nutcase.  I told him I had my screen name for a month already, and he claimed he had his for a month also.  We began to duke it out on the battlefield, I believe the map we were playing was Can the Spam.  I remember it was four teams, with each team having a little box-shaped base.  Firestorm and I didn’t have a clanwar back then, it was a namewar.  It was the first and probably the last time in my ARC career a rivalry started because of my screen name.  I didn’t have any trouble with him, killing him several times consecutively, and he left.  I kept my name. 

This was around the time my cousin came up to me about his lame idea for a clan.  He was going to call it =ATCO= which means anti-CO.  Seemed like joining CO wasn’t on his mind as much as hunting them down.  I thought it was the lamest name for a clan, but I joined anyway ‘cause I pitied the foo.  So here we were, two cousins sharing one computer and one internet connection, in a clan that would only contain the two of us.  Obviously, the clan didn’t last too long.  I had to admit it was pretty hilarious though.  My most memorable moment as an anti-CO member was going into a game against several CO’s and OgreChow commenting that he was honored that people would dedicate a clan that was against his.  He then ordered all the CO’s to massively rape me.  Very entertaining.  Well the clan was more of a joke than anything else, so after a couple days we decided to try our hands at a real clan. 

We tried for CO but it seemed like that was going to be a problem.  Apparently CO had so many applicants they didn’t know what to do with them.  So they decided to make a farm clan called COF.  I was thinking to myself: “Ok, this isn’t major league baseball, this farm system is a joke and I’m not this desperate to join CO.”  My cousin, however, joined COF.  I didn’t really think the COs took COF seriously, because they allowed everyone into COF.  All the COF tag does is tell the CO members we want to join their clan, something we can already do just by asking them without wearing any tag.  They didn’t have any organized system set up to make joining COF seem meaningful.

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