1631: GO GAMERS

The Squadron of Shame forums are coming along nicely — they're pretty much ready for the public to show up and start posting in now, so if you're at all interested in computer and video games and find that places like NeoGAF and its ilk aren't quite fitting your needs — in other words, you like to use paragraphs and write posts that include more than ten words at a time — then do feel free to come on over, sign up and start mingling with the rest of the community, who are slowly trickling over.

Forums are the spiritual home of the Squad, since it's where we, as a group, first came together. But they're also one of the most long-standing parts of the Internet — one aspect of the ever-changing digital world that has actually managed to remain reasonably constant over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

I recall my first experience with forums fairly vividly. Our first Internet service provider was CompuServe, one of several providers that, at least initially, didn't offer "true" Internet access, instead opting to provide its users with a gated set of online services exclusively for subscribers. (Full Internet access eventually came later, initially in the form of the ability to send email messages to Internet addresses instead of just CompuServe IDs, and later full-on Web access.) As part of this "gated community", CompuServe offered a swathe of forums on a whole host of specialist subjects. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found an online home in the GAMERS forum — you clicked the "GO" button and typed "GAMERS" to get there — and had my first experience of mingling with the online community.

The term "online community" these days has a certain number of negative connotations, due in part to the perpetuation of the narrative that the majority of people who post things online are somehow "toxic", and the fact that indeed, some people who post things online are somehow "toxic". But back in its early days, it was a different matter. "Flaming" and "trolling" were established terms, but they tended to be seen fairly rarely. There were extensive glossaries of the then-new emoticons and acronyms that started to creep into everyday usage, and new terms like "netiquette" were coined to describe how you should interact with other people online.

I honestly can't remember a whole lot about the sort of things I posted and discussed on the Gamers' Forum on CompuServe, but I do remember one thing vividly: I was into Wolfenstein 3-D at the time, and had been experimenting with a variety of mod tools for it, at least partly because I'd been helping a local shareware dealer write his catalogues that included a selection of Wolfenstein add-ons and editors.

Anyway, yes; I was into Wolfenstein 3-D and had spent quite some time working on a selection of new levels — ten of them, in fact. I uploaded them to the Gamers' Forum's download area for others to have a go at, but didn't think anything more of it and certainly wasn't expecting any feedback or anything.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by a gentleman named Carlton, who claimed to represent Apogee, the publisher of Wolfenstein, and also claimed to be interested in including my levels in an official expansion pack for the game. I'd be paid, he promised, and appropriately credited.

Frankly, I was at a loss as to what to do at this stage, but after some deliberation and discussion I took a chance and got in touch with Carlton, who took my contact details and promised to be in touch in short order.

Not a lot happened for a while, but then one day a package showed up. Inside it was a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks — one containing a full, registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D, and two containing the official expansion pack, the Super Upgrades pack. I installed the disks, browsed through the directory containing the game — and sure enough, there were my levels, credited to me. I was a professional game designer.

And all because of a forum. Pretty neat, huh?