Good article on Epic Games. This quote from Cliff Bleszinksi struck me:
“…there’s this certain amount of nerd cred and nerds love that, like a Tim Schafer, Gabe Newell gets that I don’t get,” he said. “And I think the first step was removing my douche-y earrings. For some reason, once I got rid of the douche-y earrings, that got [me] a lot of cred. And proving that I am a relatively intelligent person and trying to curse less. I mean all of these little things add up.”
I began my freshman year of college about a year after Unreal Tournament was released. It quickly became a sunday afternoon treat to play over the college LAN against other people. It was a good icebreaker and I made some of my first college friends that way.1
At the time I was interested in gaming journalism. I remember reading an article on Cliff Bleszinski in the fall of 2001 when someone I played UT with visited my dorm room. They saw my hulking 17″ CRT computer monitor with some short guy with gold earrings (or a necklace?) on the display.
“Who’s that?” they asked.
“That guy? He created Unreal Tournament.”
“…Ohhhhh.”
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Unreal Tournament games were then displaced by Counterstrike matches, which somehow brought in more heated rivals. My favorite story I heard was of a student going to someone else’s room after a match at 2 in the morning and loudly accusing him of cheating. After making a ruckus, demanding he sit down at his opponent’s computer to find the cheat hacks, he was thrown out of the building by an RA. He then broke down and cried.
I don’t know if any of that is true. ↩