In the fall of 1999, I started playing Unreal Tournament with a group of guys from work. One of the guys, Marmaduke, brought a bootleg copy of Unreal Tournament and loaded it on his machine. It didn’t look like the game I wanted to play, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then he loaded it on another machine, PeeWee’s. The began playing at lunch and after work. I don’t know who was next, maybe me or maybe PaulMuad’Dib, it doesn’t matter. In no time, the four of us played every day at lunch and for an hour or two after work several nights each week.
Eventually, we found a “spare” PC to use as a dedicated LAN server. I know I snuck in more than a few games when I was supposed to be working.
Then Marmaduke set up the original, 24×7 GMC server. It was one of a kind. Sure, there were other servers running bathroom maps but they would have regular gravity and perhaps sport speed settings that would make you think you were traversing the Gobi Desert in August. No, Marmaduke’s server was the shit.
After a while, I set up a six-player server called Skagalak’s Death Kamp. I ran it for about six months on Cox@home but I had the worst server in the world. I ran about four different versions of the BathroomSPE map while Marmaduke had TV-Store and Toys and a few others. I didn’t get a lot of complaints and my server was consistently very highly ranked on ngWorldStats.
My first morning regulars were usually Zflash07, Baba Oriley, Belzebuth, 1BADSOB, BLINDFISH, Toffee (cow), and a few others that are still around today using the same names. Some of those guys would hang for hours just fragging away happily and chatting when the bot count was higher than the player count. Belzie, with her “Maudit” and “LOL” at every death and kill, was a perennial favorite. Who didn’t enjoy getting rocketed every two seconds?
For a long time, it was really Marmaduke’s and Skagalak’s servers that were the default favorites for most “Bathroom map” players. Then PaulMuad’Dib opened the firewall, and the Dogs of War server was born!
At that time, we started playing around with the concept of a clan tag. We played with {DoW} (Dogs of War), which was a clan that Marmaduke had been in but from another game that I can’t remember anymore. Some months went by, and our endeavors grew. Marmaduke opened a second server and called them the Mutated Maphouse servers. About that time, I switched to a new cable provider and tried to get my server running through my Linksys router to no avail. I got a second IP just for the server and it ran fine.
This was around August of 2000. At that time, there were no real GMC clans except for the CBGB’s. Marmaduke found one or two of them on one of our servers one day, and we checked out their website. They were a clan that enjoyed playing on the same maps we were running (and PaulMuad’Dib had been editing and creating). We began to consider having a clan battle with these guys seriously. But we delayed and screwed around.
Then the aSh clan showed up on the scene almost overnight (September 2000). As soon as we saw them form up we knew we had to do something. Still, it was a month before we got together as a clan.
One day, we were playing on the Dogs of War server when some guy complained about our Laggy Ass Server. Ah, we had a great deal of fun with that! At that moment, our clan was born: the Laggy Ass Server Admins Clan. Our clan was small, with four members: Marmaduke, PaulMuad’Dib, PeeWee, and Red Bastard. Somewhat later, we added Kaz. The five of us worked together, so we got to know each other very well and enjoyed fragging the hell out of everyone.
With three clans, we started playing with the idea of clan battles. At first, it was pretty much LASA vs CBGB and then CBGB vs LASA. The CBGB players were much better than we were in Internet game playing. The LASA boys had been spoiled by months of LAN play. Lag was not in our vocabulary, but it soon would be… and how!
I remember the CBGB clan of October 2000. It was NightRanger, Doc, Pegleg, and SirTokeAlot. Our first battle was in early November, and it was a humdinger. I believe we left the battlefield with a tie, 3 maps won by each clan. It was the most exciting set of games I have ever played. No other games have ever come close, and probably no game ever will. It was exhilarating, scary, and sweet all at the same time. I know I was sweating like a stuck pig before the night was over.
The setup for the game was such an ordeal it took hours to get things working right. But once we got to battle, well, I’ve already said it was the best.
We had a rematch not long after that, where the LASA clan was swiftly defeated in four out of five games. The CBGBs earned our respect that day. All in all, I would have to say that those four guys were the epitome of good sportsmen. They made no rude comments, used no profanity, and even when they were getting the short end of the stick, they made not one complaint. We played a match featuring FIVE LASA against FOUR CBGB. I envied their professionalism, and I admired their great skill. To this day, I have never played with such a great team. I know I have played with better players and players with more skill, but no team will ever come close to their camaraderie and sportsmanship. They are the guys that made me want to be a better player.
Enough ass-kissing and going on with the history lesson.
Around that time, November 2000, I decided to gather players under my tag, SdK, which I had used for quite some time more or less as a ‘joke’. My clan was small, and I picked my first players very carefully. I snagged some of the very best players on the giant map servers. jdk, who played as Jonah and some symbol name that I can’t reproduce anymore, was one of the first I recruited. He and his roommate, deeZnutZ, were ALWAYS on my server. I mean, like several hours each day. He was one of those guys who could make an ESR shot that would astound you the first time and infuriate you the 12th time. I added 1dot8, after having a huge argument with him while playing as LASA’s Red Bastard. I later patched things up and showed him the ropes on some of the Giant Maps. He brought along a friend, CobraR, and both were soon sporting SdK tags. CANDYMAN came next, and he also ran a bathroom map server called CANDYLAND (its child is still running today). Not long after that, we brought “B” onto the team as Tempus. He was a CANDYLAND player.
And so, without belaboring the birth of the SdK clan, we now had four clans in the group. We had no name in mind at that point, but some of us were talking about organizing into a community. Websites popped up and changed daily. aSh and CBGB had good sites. I had started a LASA site (which can still be viewed at http://204.26.80.132:8080/lasa/), but Marmaduke and PaulMuad’Dib registered www.planetlasa.com and put up the site that still exists there today.
Not much later, after the birth of SdK came the 2399 and GFY clans. I remember the 2399 clan as a bunch of players that hung around on CANDYLAND almost exclusively. One day, they were a bunch of loners, and the next, they were wearing the 2399 tag in front of their names like this: 2399Reaper. Or maybe it was reaper2399. Anyway, suddenly, we had six clans, and things started getting serious.
In December of 2000, I started up SdK #2 as a full-time server. I believe it was around this time that Dogs of War became LASA Giants. I don’t remember when Giants #2 was set up, but it was probably around the same time.
The aSh clan, specifically BabOriley and NoseGoober began working on a project called “Porcelain Gods”. This would be our community website with features like forums, java-based chat, and a PHP calendar that could be used to schedule matches between clans. It was going to be the bomb! Soon other clans were getting involved and big meetings were held on ICQ (which always sucked) and on the newly established community site on Yahoo.
At this time, the CBGB clan started expanding like mad. They brought in many recruits like Chopper and another guy who is better left out of the discussion. Suffice it to say that this person became the first clan member ever to be fired from a GMC clan. Doh! Who remembers his name? Anyone? Anyone?
The Porcelain Gods project started to get off the ground. The website was set up using phpnuke, which a lot of us didn’t understand and didn’t really like. The admin, NoseGoober, dropped out of his clan to be an impartial ruler over the website. In the end, infighting, squabbles, and egos got the better of us all, and the project died a very painful death. NoseGoober never truly gave up but he changed his name to Zone_Zero and set up www.giantmaps.com, which seems to be a dead link now… well, it never made a big impression with the Giant Map fans.
Things began moving faster as we moved into 2001. Even more, clans were spotted, and some still exist today, although their makeup differed from when they started. We witnessed the birth and death of HEK and the One-Handed Monkey Spankers. HEK never grew beyond three or four players, but at one point, there were quite a few Spankers on our servers.
It was also in January that I saw the first RATs. They could have been around for a while, but that’s when they were sighted scurrying around on my servers. Then, in February, we saw an explosion of clans. Who remembers the doomed 4130 clan? How about the HR clan? I still see Chaos now and then but the others have disappeared. The 187/108 clan was born and died in February. And then the DbD clan became a reality.
I believe March heralded the arrival of the first server with Fragism rented by the CBGB clan. This was a major turning point in the evolution of the GMC. With this new 10-player server, we could experience some excellent games! Before this, almost all the clan battles took place on LASA Giants. I don’t think anyone ever thanked PaulMuad’Dib for providing his server for our battles. I always felt thankful to have them available. It wasn’t long after that the new DbD clan set up their fragism server. As you can tell, some of the other clans followed suit, and there were suddenly plenty of places to get your ass fragged.
Also in March, Skagalak hosted a crappy, five-day long tournament called the Mad Men of March UT Tourney. It is still my opinion that it was a disaster.
After the failure of the Porcelain Gods project, everyone moved to the Yahoo UT Giant Map Clans club page. It was a great step towards organizing and uniting the many clans and independent players. Yet even with all of its features, something was missing. It was hard to follow threads, and it was often unavailable. Then we had the great debacle with another player best left nameless. I know most of you have had the displeasure of meeting this woman on a server. Egad. If anything could destroy our community, it would be this witch. But she failed in her mission, although I’m sure she would take great delight in our current dilemma.
So, at that point, I decided to try to revive the community website/forum idea that we had given up on in March. I found some forum packages and loaded them on my home web server. Two or three were tested out in March and, after careful testing and evaluation, we picked the Blaze forum package for the official UT GMC site. Our forum was born in late March or early April of 2001 and was hosted on www.planetsdk.com . However, the jerks that run www.featureprice.com (a low-rent web hosting company) started shutting down the web server that hosted our forum due to, as they put it: “massive excessive bandwidth usage”. A new home needed to be found. I found www.origindesign.net , a local Omaha company with a super fast server and reasonable pricing.
It wasn’t long after this that the aSh clan fell apart and eventually dissolved. Their website and game servers disappeared one day, never to return. No explanation has ever been given as to what happened. One of the great mysteries of the GMC. Some players joined the remaining clans, and others just went their own way, eventually laying down their mouse and keyboard to pursue other interests.
More new clans were added to the forum as the months progressed towards summer. BOP, SPORT, WOC, BIA, and others. Some have come and gone quickly, like the BB clan, while others have been here and gone and returned (SPORT).
Many, many clan battles have been fought with hardly a good record being kept by any clan, although the SdK clan probably has the best records of who they fought, who won, and by how much.
Still, sadly, the GMC has never fully reached its potential to unite and compete in scheduled matches the way it was envisioned so long ago in the many Yahoo and ICQ chats. I had always hoped that the clans could fight battles on a tight schedule with real tournaments that would pit clan against clan for the title of Masters of the GMC.
Then End
For Now