For whatever reason I never tried Armor Critical. I don't even own a keyboard or mouse for the past 10 years so I would probably fail spectacularly if I tried playing.
I kind of stumbled upon ARC by accident. I was fairly active on IRC at the time and some random user PyroX (?? can't believe I remember that) shared a link to the game and I was hooked immediately! I had always wanted to play games like DOOM online with my school friends, but my computer was terrible. So ARC was my first online gaming experience.
I mainly played the noob maps in the beginning as all beginners do until one day ChaosEgo, GopherEgo, Iginest?, and Nana_Ego entered MadWars and completely dominated everyone. 12-13 y/o me thought they looked so cool with EgO in their name
And I kind of realized there's some skill involved in this. Shortly after I got my first clan invite. Amazingly the website got indexed by archive.org and you can view it here (NSFW): https://web.archive.org/web/20010623163 ... stunt/666/ (whoever manages that clan list in these forums can update it!).There was definitely some interesting times and I had some awesome memories. This is all completely random and some of it is coming back to me as a type so here it goes.
I still remember when I joined Clan Ogre, I thought it was the most amazing thing to see my bio on a real .com address. That probably seems silly now, but back then kids only used the free websites. OgreChow and Belsen (?) tried to convince me to go to university with them, but for me the internet was this virtual reality and I had no intention of ever meeting someone online in real life. I think OgreChow went on to join Popcap and he launched some cool pirate themed game.
As an ARC admin I created a weird tool to detect cheaters by IP address. I think it was pretty terrible and likely had tons of false positives as most people had dialup with dynamic IP addresses. Periodically I would run some command in the TEN interface to get a list of users/IP addresses, then I import it into my tool, and it would flag matching users. So at some point I basically had a database of every single username that had played ARC. But sadly I lost all my ARC archives over time. Speaking of ARC admin times, during the last days on TEN, one of the TEN employees accidentally banned my admin account and for whatever reason he apologized and created some fun admin accounts as a joke to let me use, one of which was ARC-ViperX. Since TEN was dying, I had shared the account with a close online friend, day61, using a very weak password. And not too long later, the real ViperX brute forced the password and started kicking everyone out of the lobby with a real admin account! whoops. Speaking of ViperX, we dueled one time while he was using infinite ammo. I totally destroyed him. I don't remember why I remembered that just now, but it was fun
As I got better I did smurf a ton (sorry!). I actually kept a list of every single username I used on TEN in a plain text file. I have no idea why. For some reason, back then I got interested in steganography, stored the text file in an image, forgot about it, and deleted the image! Rookie mistake. I think RNR (Red nose reindeer) was the first smurf clan I joined around X-Mas time on TEN, and then inspired me to start my own. I believe they were Dwarf on TEN and later *Snorks* on WON/Sierra both of which were composed of most of the top 15 players hehe. I made an awesome flash website for Snorks if anyone has that archived that would be fun to see. I can't really remember most of the names I used to be honest. Probably one of the more recent that some people may remember were Superman in RM (?). I only remember that because I made some flash animation with the superman theme song on the website if I remember correctly hehe. And for my most recent and embarrassing moment, I was the most annoying person in the chat spamming animalz.tz to everyone (if anyone remembers that, yes seriously that was me..!). ~25 years has passed I guess I can share that
I guess that's enough for now. But I'm sure I have lots of other random ARC snippets to share. Some old websites are still up or archived and are fun to look at. For now here's one:
https://www.angelfire.com/me/archm/start.html
