Pascal: Origins

of course a master of the zergling rush

I've been playing video games since I was very young. I only played console games until my family got its first computer around when I was 11. The first notable games I played were Starcraft and Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I played other games, but RTS games were by far my favorite.

My brother owned Warcraft 3 but he insisted that I'd break it if I played it, so he never let me. I finally played it when I visited my family in Germany - my uncle specifically asked me if there were any games I'd like to play while I was visiting and I asked him for it. Once I got home, I secured myself a copy of it and played it for months.

When World of Warcraft first came out, I didn't even know it existed, but my brother got it a few months after its release. He no longer believed I would break his computer just by touching it and he more or less demanded that I come upstairs and play it.

like I didn't know you didn't have to do every quest

He walked me through picking a realm and making a character and he let me play while he was at work. While I was familiar with combat, quests, and gear in a general video game sense, it was the first MMO I'd ever played and it was all very new to me. I recognized a lot from Warcraft 3 and had rolled a tauren because they had been my favorite unit from the RTS.

When my brother got back home, I had to stop playing. I got a free trial code from him and installed the game onto my computer.

My computer was a HP Pavillion we bought at Best Buy for $300 in 2002. If you don't know what that means, it did not run WoW very well. I would go so far as to say it was a miracle that it ran it at all. My frames per second was what most would refer to as "unplayable". But I still played, and I played all the time.

my computer, basically

I played WoW a half an hour before school, all day after school, and I woke up at 3 am on weekends to play. Nothing kept me from playing, not my horrible computer, not school, friends, eating or sleeping. While I still exhibit obsessive behavior at times, as a more or less adult I tend to stop playing games to eat, sleep, and perform other responsibilities - nothing like how obsessed I was with World of Warcraft.

The first time I played WoW was unique. It's not comparable to any other game, any other MMO, and in fact it's not comparable to itself. For what it is right now, it is an entirely different game than it was when it came out. I still play a lot, but nothing like I used to. Each expansion has changed the game fundamentally from what it used to be.

Unlike a console game, we can't go back and play the original World of Warcraft - that's part of the nature of the game, for better or for worse.