As I said in the introductory post, the gaming community of the late nineties was a very different beast to the one we have today. Not just because of things seemed so much more unfinished, but without the ubiquity of social media, sometimes all you would know about someone would be a username and a typing style.
Sometimes, not even that.
It's probably just that I was a teenager at the time, but things seemed so much more open and free. Anybody with an idea for a map could boot up Hammer, the half-life map editor, and cobble something together, which meant that there were hundreds upon hundreds of worlds to explore. Most of them were the same derivative stuff of course, but that just meant the thrill you got when you found something genuinely unique or creative -- like the genius House of Escher, that hid its teleportation with environmental factors to make it seem like you were looping round in a space that couldn't possibly physically exist -- was that much more earned. The experience was like being an explorer on some alien planet, uncovering vistas that possibly nobody else had ever seen before.
Other maps were less successful but still interesting, like the unfinished CartoonLand, which for its enemies tried to remodel Half Life's vortigaunts with brightly-coloured textures and cartoonish "Bonk!" sound effects when they fired lightning. Unfortunately the author's ambition exceeded his technical skill, and the enemies ended up on entirely the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley. It didn't help that the author's enthusiasm for retexturing the environment seemed to cut out midway through, so that second half of the map involved fighting off weird pseudo-cartoonish monsters with an assault rifle in the eerie, organic-looking corrdiors of Xen, Half-Life's endgame. Or that, text being the easiest thing to add in, the map kept up what the author (who clearly didn't speak English as a first language) thought was a cheery, jokey commentary throughout the whole grotesque experience.
In a way, though, the jankiness of the whole scene was kind of its appeal. You didn't feel like you were playing a polished, perfected product that had been carefully tested to appeal to you. It was there, warts and all, and the obvious amateurishness just hammered home the fact that you had absolutely no guarantee how the game was going to play out.
One of the greatest innovations in this sense of the unknown came with Sven Co-op, a (hilariously bug-ridden) mod for Half-Life that allowed you to play cooperative maps with people across the internet. If downloading custom maps and playing them made me feel like a lone pioneer, Sven Co-op made me feel like part of an expedition, navigating our way through hostile and unfamiliar territory together. The genius of the thing was how Sven Co-op allowed its multiplayer servers to download a map's .bsp file to your PC if you didn't already have it. Instead of having to make sure that everybody had agreed on a map to download and install, you could just get your clan together online, find a server, and place yourselves at the mercy of its random map rotation.
Oh, and the goodwill of the mapmakers, of course. Sven Co-op was programmed by amateurs, for amateurs, and they made the common mistake of being way too generous with what they'd allowed their netcode to do. Valve had long since patched out the ability for a hacker to do things like open your computer's CD drive from across a server, but the Sven devteam were too dysfunctional to get security holes like that patched up.
Anyway, I mentioned that I played with a clan, so I should probably come clean about that whole thing. We called ourselves Delta Force, and we started off playing deathmatch maps and giving each other ranks like in the army. As time went on, some of us -- partially due to my enthusiasm for the co-op game, if I'm kind to myself -- ended up drifting more and more into that side of things. That caused a bit of internal drama: our then-leader, who went by the tag Sgt.KING, really didn't like them. He wasn't a bad guy, really, just one of those kids who had an absolute hard-on for the military and wouldn't shut up about it, despite his combat experience having gone no further than watching Vietnam films.
Anyway, KING got real snippy when we ended up spending more time playing co-op than deathmatch, and ended up leaving the clan in the kind of dramastorm that only teenagers on the internet can generate. It was probably for the best, anyway: we were all getting pretty tired of the faux-military schtick. A couple of us kept the ranks KING had given us ironically. I had called myself Sgt.Player(1) -- a joke on the way that Half-Life's default deathmatch name was just 'Player', followed by Player(1) and Player(2) if that was already taken -- so I figured I would switch to Prof.Player(1). After all, we had been demilitarised now.
The new clan leader was a guy from Canada called h0nk, all in lower case. h0nk was everything that KING wasn't: laid-back, good-natured, and kind of a burn-out. He was the obvious choice, really. h0nk had always been the one to patch things up in the past, when KING's obnoxiousness and chauvenism had pissed people off, and we'd all decided that we weren't interested in winning any more: we just wanted to have fun and bum around weird new maps.
For a long time we played on the official servers that had the same rotation of tried and tested maps, mostly ones that came free with Sven Co-op, but it started to get to the stage where we'd run through everything there was to see, and we were starting to get disillusioned with the whole thing again. It felt like a lot of the more creative servers were dying off, especially once Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 and a lot of the Sven Co-op playerbase transitioned away to that.
Then one evening h0nk mentioned on chat that he had found something new. Apparently someone had linked on one of the Planet Half-Life forums to a server they'd found called Zekes Discount Bsps. He'd saved a bookmark to the thread, but since then it had been locked and deleted. A bit of digging turned up that a flamewar had broken out over the server allegedly stripping the credits from maps it was using, and the mods had decided that it wasn't worth it.
h0nk hadn't been deterred, though. Searching for Zekes Discount Bsps got him a homepage that simply read, in unformatted HTML, "Zekes Discount Bsps is closed for business", but whoever operated the site hadn't cleared the rest of the directory, and we were eventually able to find some subpages that had an IP address for the server, which was miraculously still up.
And what a goldmine it was. The MOTD when you logged in just read -- lack of punctuation included -- "Welcome to zekes discount Bsps. All the maps you want to play for low low prices". As far as we could tell, nobody was still moderating it; at least, we never saw anybody with the admin tag log in in all the time we were there. In fact, we never saw anybody there other than ourselves. For all we knew, Zeke had set this thing to run on boot on a server at work, then lost his job, and his replacement hadn't noticed.
But whoever Zeke was, he was clearly a major hoarder of maps. It looked like he'd done a straight download of everything on PlanetHalfLife at one point, finished or unfinished, and that was just for starters. There were all sorts of things in there, some of which barely qualified as playable. I remember one map called "Don't Kill The Headcrab!" where the players had to survive in a gradually shrinking room with a single enemy headcrab without any one of them dying to it or anybody killing it. Another, "The Irritation Machine", simply required you to walk the length of a single long corridor, and mocked you at the end for going to the effort. "Defend The Forum" sticks in my mind as a surprisingly detailed and well-designed map in which the players have to protect NPCs presumably named after posters in some long-dead forum from "trolls", an onslaught of standard Half-Life grunts all given names in obnoxious leetspeak. It always struck me as a little depressing that somebody had poured so much time and effort into something that wouldn't have meaning outside of a tiny group of their peers. Then again, I guess that was pretty par for the course of being a teenager on the Internet.
Anyway, with us spending the amount of time that we did on Zekes Discount Bsps, it inevitable that sooner or later we would encounter TRAINING.bsp.
