I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.
Today I'm combining two posts into a single entry since they were both very short.
The following was originally posted on November 26th, 2006 under the title "Strange WoW Moment Of The Day":
Paraphrased, as usual, as I don't have a proper chat log and all the superfluous chat speak would only kill your brains anyway.
In the jungles of Stranglethorn, two adventurers spy a familiar name...
Me: Hi Para!
Parachel: Hi guys! How are you doing?
Me: Oh, we're levelling up nicely...
Parachel: So I see.
Khytez: And how are you?
Parachel: Oh, just running around, killing stuff...
Me: Gotta love WoW small talk. What do you have to do here?
Parachel: Oh, just kill a regular level forty, nothing fancy.
Me: Ah, that's good. We have to find a troll.1
Parachel: Did you ever kill that level 42 elite in Arathi?
Me: Which one?
Parachel: This giant...2
Me: A giant? No, I'm sure I would remember that.
Khytez: Yeah, we nailed him.
Me: What? You do all the fun stuff without me! :o
Khytez: But you were there!
Me: No, I'm pretty sure I wasn't...
Khytez: Ok, maybe you weren't there after all.
Me: Then again you may be right, I probably won't remember tomorrow what I did today...
Parachel: You two sound as if you're married. :D
Khytez: ...
Me: lol
One word: Awwwkwaaard. :-P3
The following was originally posted on December 2nd, 2006 under the title "Arma Virumque Cano":
Ugh, nobody should have to get up at eight in the morning on a Saturday. The streets were practically empty when I left home, but I had a tutoring appointment at ten.4 [...]
While eating breakfast I quickly logged onto WoW just because I was curious whether any of my friends would actually be online at such a crazy time. One guy was, so I started a conversation with: "Haha, I didn't actually think anyone would be online at this crazy time!" :-P I proceeded by mentioning that I'd have to tutor someone in Latin in an hour, to which he replied with "arma virumque cano..." (the first three words of the Aeneid), which made me squee because it's rare enough that I meet someone else who had Latin in school and as it happens this is also the work my tutoring focuses on this time. We continued to chat and as it turned out the guy is actually a German living in Holland. "Warum sprechen wir dann Englisch?" - "Gute Frage."5 :-D Knowing me, you can imagine that I was quite pleased to find someone on an English server who speaks both German and Dutch (and Latin). It was only a small thing but it totally made my morning.6
1 Saying that you're in Stranglethorn to look for a troll is such an incredibly vague statement that I find it quite hilarious in hindsight, and yet... considering the rest of the conversation implies that we were probably past level 40 at this point, I'd venture that we were looking for Mogh the Undying for The Star, the Hand and the Heart. Some quests really were that memorable back then.
2 This was in reference to Fozruk, the elite giant that patrols a good chunk of the zone and is part of a fairly long quest chain.
3 As someone who's loooking back at these posts with an interest in what I thought of the game in those early months of playing it for the first time, it's mildly infuriating how little past me actually talked about the game itself. Instead you get entries like this, which are just about some banter with a guy we'd done some group content with. Though I guess that is telling in itself, in the sense that at the time, my focus wasn't on the world and its contents (though I did love it) but rather on all the people I met in this strange new online space and how we interacted with each other. I do seem to recall that Parachel was a male human mage.
4 I was giving private Latin lessons at the time to earn a bit of cash on the side.
5 "Why are we speaking English then?" "Good question."
6 And yet, I didn't even record the guy's character name...
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Shintar, I wanted to thank you for bringing all of your old posts back to life like this. It's not only a peek into your early forays into WoW, but a glimpse into your past self, before we met online.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! I generally don't like to think back on those particular years too much because while there were definitely some good parts, university in general was not a great time for me (which very much goes counter to how most people seem to talk about their uni years) and I prefer not to dwell on that too much.
DeleteAh! You were at university! That explains the eight o clock on a Saturday thing! As someone who'll be starting work at 8am tomorrow, and who was actually supposed to be starting at 7am until I talked them out of it, I was wondering...
DeleteYeah, I don't think getting up at 8am on a Saturday is a "crazy time" anymore either, haha! But when you're a student, these things are different...
DeleteI start work at 6am (my choice), so sleeping in to 8am on a Saturday is difficult. I'm so used to being up really early that sleeping in that 'late' doesn't work. It also doesn't help to have two cats who are waiting for me to give them their morning treats and they know I'm late. ;)
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