I should say right now that the clan weren't the type to be easily shocked. One of the things I respected h0nk the most for was drawing a line on the kind of 'edgy' humour that a lot of online communities at that time indulged in. That said, we had all fallen for links to goatse, and worse, at some point or another.
Even so, there was something about the way the body was rendered that just made you want to look away. Perhaps it was the way that the primitive engine made it seem to still be grinning excitedly, or perhaps it was just the level of effort that the maker had clearly put into modelling this thing and the world around it.
h0nk thought we were fucking with him at first when we explained what it was, and I had to crawl back through the vent and take a turn kneeling so that he could climb through himself. He wasn't impressed either, and he was trying to suggest we should move on when someone else -- I can't remember who it was -- realised that the door was now unlocked.
Outside TRAINING's bedroom is a long hall, wood-panelled with purple carpeting. The whole map from this point onwards seems to use entirely custom-built textures for its geometry, which would explain the large filesize.
I distinctly remember that I was one of the first ones through the door, and we had just started to check to see if any of the other doors were locked when a slamming behind us informed us that it had closed again.
The thing about the era before voice chat became commonplace is that panic makes a bad situation that much more of a clusterfuck, as people sacrifice the ability to move in order to hurriedly type "wtf". Personally I ran back towards the room, and got to watch the rest of my clan burst one by one into gibs before my character popped too.
It was on.
We went back to playing TRAINING on loop, on our clan's private server. It didn't take us long to work out what we'd done wrong: to keep the door to the rest of the map open, somebody had to keep their character facing the dismembered body. If they looked away, even for a moment, the door would slam shut again and everybody inside the new secret area would burst into gibs, one at a time.
Initially divisible_by_zero volunteered for corpse-watching duty, and the rest of us headed through to map the branching maze of hotel corridors beyond. 'Map' is the right word; the place was enormous, empty, and would take any opportunity to kill you without warning. h0nk was still not happy about this: he kept saying that he didn't want to legitimize whatever point the maker was trying to make. The more we explored, the more I started to agree with him: whoever built TRAINING clearly had a teenaged sense of humour that a lot of us had started to move on from, making players flip switches to kill the helpless 'scientist' NPCs before doors would open and they could progress. Thinking about it now, this was around about the time that the Saw films started making their way into the mainstream, so it could well have been he'd taken influence from them.
By now, though, we'd gotten ourselves invested. When we posted about TRAINING.bsp on the forums, we talked about the mapmaker's plans as if we knew him, personally, as if this had been a challenge that he'd set us to complete. Some of us were even starting to speculate that we did: that it had been designed by KING in an attempt to break our spirit.
Whoever it was, it certainly became clear that he had a penchant for tricking players into murdering one another with rooms like the Double Cell (as we came to call it). Here, two players would have to enter two prison cells simeltaneously to hold down levers and allow the rest of the group to progress. The kicker came when either of them tried to leave: the first player to let go of their lever would be able to escape, but the other would be crushed messily. The whole experience seemed to be designed to set us at each others' throats, and for a while it almost succeeded, but h0nk's patience, in the end, kept us together.
That was one of the puzzles that we had to navigate. There were others, far too many to describe here. I remember having to navigate through a maze of invisible barriers, while the walls of the room flashed in vivid, ugly, red-and-green zigzags. It wasn't until somebody posted in chat "Oh shit, guys, look away from the screen for a moment" that we realised that staring at the strobing walls had messed with our vision somehow, and we couldn't see colour correctly for a few minutes. The train from before made a few guest reappearances, now retextured so that its frontpiece was now smeared with blood and gore, with its trademark "WOO WOO" whistle as it flattened us. The mapmaker's gusto for anime girls continued unabated through the rest of the map, with the art style becoming more amateurish and crudely-scanned as the level went on. We started speculating that we were looking at the designer's hand-drawn art.
The first problem came when we finally figured out a path through the wood-panelled corridors and into a darker area with walls of rusty, corrugated metal. Almost straight away we heard it over chat: two lines that would replace "WOO WOO" in our shared patois as the byline for failure:
divisible_by_zero: Shit
divisible_by_zero: I fucke dup
and, just like our first foray into the hotel corridors, the chat filling with screams of frustration at divisible, players started popping like meaty balloons.
