PixlBit

Like I said, I didn't play a lot of video games in high school except occasionally, so that pretty ends my teenage years with Gaming Under the Influence. My next episode comes after high school in summer of 1996 when I was living in Minnesota, and my friends Gregg and Rob came up and visited me. Gregg brought weed, and we went out onto the lake and smoked, and then returned home to play Star Control 2 multiplayer. 

Star Control 2 has a robust single player, but it's multiplayer is brilliant. Two players battle it out in space on a 2D field, choosing from an array of alien ships, each with different abilities and weapons. Now, this might be hard to imagine these days, but playing a two player game on the computer back then meant you shared a keyboard with the other player, and on one side of the keyboard are your keys, and on the other, his. So imagine two guys, crunched up on the same keyboard, playing in front of a 15" tube screen while the sound is blasted out of the - you guessed it - Soundblaster.

This was fun, and while we battled we ate stale Tostitos with sour cream. Yum. 

But mostly I didn't do a lot of drugs up in Minnesota. It was a drying out time. But I did get my wisdom teeth out later, and was treated to a codeine paradise for a few days as I healed. During this time, I played Master of Orion, a 4X space game where you manage your space empire. I used to play games like this a lot, and the codeine really put me into the zone as I chewed on the cotton in my mouth to staunch the bloodflow. 

The internet was a lot different back then. I used MSN and AOL, and Netscape I think. I used to chat online with strangers in chat rooms, and Microsoft had this one that put cartoon characters and speech bubbles up when you chatted to give it a little more flair. My character was a trenchcoat wearing cat with sunglasses.  THat always cracked me up. 

Anyway, that's it for these memories!  More later!