#oneaday Day 106: The Gated Community, Part 1

You know what I miss from "the good old days" of The Internet? (And by that, I mean "the pre-social media age") Clearly demarcated communities. I'm going to talk a bit about my past experiences with these over the course of the next few posts.

Nowadays this sort of thing isn't a fashionable thing to say and brings forth accusations of "echo chambers" and suchlike, and to be sure there's a certain amount of truth to those words. But I have far more fond memories of being a member of various "gated" communities rather than the messy, free-for-all that is modern social media. Sadly, this seems to be an age long gone.

My first experience with online interactions was via online service CompuServe, which I discovered the other day is still sort of around in the form of a pleasingly simple, straightforward and rather retro home page. These interactions on CompuServe took a few forms: there was the real-time "CB Simulator", which was an early incarnation of real-time chat. There were the forums, which is where I spent the majority of my time. And there was email, which I mostly used to try (and fail) to hook up with girls I'd met in the CB Simulator, all the time conscious that I was sharing a single email address with my parents.

The gaming forum on CompuServe, GO GAMERS, was a fun hangout — although in retrospect I don't remember doing a ton of interacting with others there. Instead, I'd spend a lot of my time downloading shareware and freeware that previously I'd have had to rely on magazine cover disks and the local shareware library to get copies of.

I did have one significant interaction, though: I met a guy whose name is now lost to the mists of time (I want to say Clayton something?) who claimed to be from renowned shareware publisher Apogee, and he was on the hunt for fan-created levels for Wolfenstein 3-D that could be included in an upcoming expansion pack. I'd recently got into Wolfenstein editing, and had been discussing level design and editor software in the forum. Long story short, this guy offered me $200 for my levels. I talked it over with my parents, and they didn't see any particular danger — the guy wasn't asking for any unreasonable personal details or anything, and besides, we had clear records of all of my communications with him should anything untoward happen.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting anything to come of this particular interaction, but I was happy to take a chance on it. I sent him my pack of ten levels and waited. He thanked me, then there was nothing for a little while.

Then a few months later, I got a package in the post. Contained within were three floppy disks: one containing a copy of the full registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D (which I actually didn't own at the time — all my levels had been created for the shareware version!) and two that held the "Super Upgrades" expansion he'd been telling me about. As well as that, there was a cheque for $200. I attempted to cash it and it was indeed real.

$200 is a lot of money to a secondary school kid. It did not, however, take long for my friends to convince me to spend it on video games. A fool and his money and all that.

All of the above is irrefutable proof that I'm technically a professional game developer. All thanks to GO GAMERS, may it rest in digital peace.