I still believe this:
I see playing games now as a waste of time.
However, I remember the wasted summer of '98. I spent most of the the time glued to the computer playing the best game in my opinion, StarCraft.
I say StarCraft is the best game ever made as it entertained me for many hours, but more importantly, it sparked my young mind to want to
#learntocode. I quickly found out that a graphical game like that was out of my league to do alone, but a text based RPG wasn't out of the question.
If I recall correctly, Perl was the popular choice at the time, but PHP found its way in front of me and seemed a hundred times easier than Perl. So, I pursued writing my text based game.
I loosely based the theme of my game on The Terrans of StarCraft, picking robots. It quickly rose to the ranks of being in the Top 5 of text based browser games of the era (when top sites voting scripts were also popular).
I left it—not willfully, a partner stole it—shortly after reaching 10,000 members. There were hundreds online at any given time. It also had a chat room that was constantly bustling with small talk and discussions about different elements of the game with the latter really confined to their clan's private old school threaded bulletin board/forum (> >> >>> >>>>).
Time sure does fly!
