Delta Force made our last expedition into TRAINING.bsp on July 9th, 2005. h0nk took corpse-watching duty, and the rest of us made our way through the maze of traps. We'd figured it would be a run like any other: we'd gotten used to the creepy chat messages that h0nk was forced to communicate, and we were starting to get a handle on the way puzzles in the Junkyard worked. Things were going pretty smoothly when h0nk spoke up in chat with a message we hadn't seen before.
h0nk: guys, stop playing now
h0nk: this isn't a message. this is serious. this run is over.
h0nk: gotta go
h0nk disconnected.
That was all I managed to record before the game crashed catastrophically on me. The rest of the clan reported something similar.
We didn't hear from h0nk again. At the time, it was pretty easy to just vanish off the internet if you wanted. He deleted his account on our forums that night, as well as the email address that he used. If he had a real name, we didn't know it.
Things pretty much fell apart after that. Some of us supposed that the job of corpse-watching just got to him, like it got to divisible. Others speculated that his family -- his homelife was one of the few things that he was open about with us -- came in and freaked out. And a bunch of them jumped back to the conspiracy theory about KING. A few of us posted our findings on PlanetHalfLife, but by then the community was dead, or dying.
I never really got to the bottom of TRAINING.bsp. My life got kind of complicated for a while after that, and I drifted away from FPS games. If it wasn't for the screenshots that I kept, I'd be convinced it was some weird, improbable dream.
That's really all I have to share with you. I'm sorry if it's not the ending you were hoping for. We don't always get them. But I hope that at last it's been an interesting ride through one of the truly weirder bits of early 2000s first-person shooters.
