Our Gaming History

Prologue

I guess most people will find this post to be very unengaging, but I want to structure up a record of our shared history of computer gaming. This is of both for nostalgic reasons and as a sort of therapy.

So, as I have mentioned in other texts, our friendship started out with us gaming and ended with us gaming (on Javed's very last day of consciousness). I might as well point out that we did a lot of other things besides this, of course, but gaming was indeed a potent way for us to work together towards a common goal in a stimulating framework (later the only practical way to go about this when living continents apart). I am tempted to dig into the meaning of things like gaming for men (yes, I use the word "men" for this apparent childish endeavor by purpose) later on. I would like to make the case that gaming could serve as a substitute and outlet to meaningful functions embedded deep within us - perhaps especially in men when it comes to task-driven cooperation in an hierarchical order. With that being said, computer games will always serve as a gateway to unlimited imagination for all youthful minds.

We were both very prone to nostalgia. In 2002, when Javed was back here in Sweden for a period of time, we got the idea to gather a bunch of friends and give a talk about old games and old computer systems. Thus, we industriously created fact sheets, and I did color printouts at work. Since I am an information hoarder (which should be clear by now for those who have read some of my other posts about Javed) I still have the sheets.

To be honest, I guess no one of our friends would have shared our enthusiasm about such a talk. Just now it struck me that all my remaining friends are of the sensing (S) personality type according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory (a couple of years ago, I urged all of my closer acquaintances to take the test). Now I am going to go astray about this a bit since it is kind of a personal revelation to me. So, my remaining friends prefer to:

focus on the reality on how things are
pay attention to concrete facts and details
engage in ideas that have practical implications
describe things in a specific, literal way

But me and Javed were intuitive (N) to our cores, and those personalities prefer to:

enjoy ideas and concepts for their own sake
imagine the possibilities of how things could be
notice big pictures and see how everything connects
describe things in a figurative, poetic way

I always have had a little struggle dealing with my friends' apparent lack of enthusiasm and engagement in my ideas and creations. That's one reason I start this post with a disclaimer, and some paragraphs further down brings it to light again. It's this lingering feeling that no one really have the energy or ability to care about abstract, and maybe complex, matters somewhat distant to their own psychical surroundings.

But Javed did. I still struggle with the loss, because it really feels that I've lost something immensely significant in my world. The sole person that got it. The other me among the many Others. It has become very clear to me this year that this echoing presence got in-twined with my inner sense of marvelous inspiration. From Javed, my projected light would often bounce back to me, not seldom with even greater intensity. Now this mirror is shattered, and the razor-sharp fragments of merciless tragedy lies scattered over my inner landscape.

But let's do an absurd shift back from grim reality to lighthearted play.

The first two fact sheets presented gaming systems that we primarily used before we became friends: Commodore 64 and Nintendo Entertainment System. Looking at these sheets there are some games we agreed on have had an impact in both our childhoods:

Commodore 64

Nintendo Entertainment System

None of these old gems constituted a shared gaming experience, though, but were pure nostalgia.

The Early Years 1987-1995

Arcade

So, I found Javed playing an arcade game in the local video store in Kallhäll, a suburb to Stockholm where we grew up, in the summer of 1987. When I stood there looking at him playing, he asked me to join in. I did, and I tried my best to keep up. He was skilled and fast, and I realized that he was competing against some other kid in the area for the top spot on the high-score list. The game was Gemini Wing (video).

We did play some other games that were to be found in local diners and a café. Here are some honorable mentions:

The Atari ST Era

Later that evening we went to Javed's place to watch a rented movie and play on his Atari ST. I had never played on that system before and was impressed by it. Soon got an Atari myself. Below is our fact sheet for the talk (that never happened).

Most of the titles in the list above were single player games. While we sometimes took turns with those, they were mainly solitary business. When I read the names now, I feel a whisper of the awe and excitement I felt back then, and Javed for sure would have felt the same thing. For some reason we forgot to include Double Dragon (video), which we also played on arcade, and Golden Axe (video) in the list. Those were two player platform fighter games we played quite a lot. We did, however, include Dynamite Düx (video), and there was a little story behind this game that Javed laid out just a year ago or so...but the details are lost to me. I have to log things in order to remember them. We might have washed his mother's car or something to get money to buy it. We did that a few times. Mostly to be able to buy hamburgers at the recently opened McDonald's.

Our Atari ST era had enough significance for me to actually buy a practically unused Atari ST on a sales site just some ten years ago. It didn't give a clear TV signal though, so I got most of the money paid back, but with an almost mint condition box and an unused oh so classic TAC-2 joystick, I cannot but to hang on to it. I will dig it out of storage and unpack it for the purpose of writing this blog post and snap a photo of it.

Around 1990, Javed, me and Mattias went to a programming course in Basic, held by the eccentric programming teacher Nils Eng (here's a finding from back then - he seem to be nerdy about photography nowadays). I remember nothing from the actual course, but I do remember that Nils got upset when we had soda cans near the keyboards, and also that Javed and Mattias heckled me for a t-shirt I wore to class that had the text "Levi's - Heroes" on it, which they kept repeating over and over again.

Javed got a PC like Atari system, Atari ST Mega 2, for not very clear reasons. Supposedly he got the hype bug that he was very prone to catch. It was kind of a disappointment. I haven't been able to pinpoint the year, but somewhere between 1991 and 1993 he bought a "real" PC computer.

Enter the Personal Computer

I still used my Atari ST very frequently, but Javed now focused of his new PC system. By this time, we had been attending separate high schools for about a year and I had started to hang out with Andreas from my class. Andreas was also a borderline computer geek at that time, and he soon got to know Javed. As a great fan of the fantasy role-playing games of the Ultima series, Andreas had plans to make his own game in the fashion of Ultima. Such a creative idea had of course me and Javed engaged. It turned out Nils Eng had programmed a tool for making the graphics to Ultima like games, so we started to visit him in his house. Nils was, I can imagine, thrilled to get the attention.There I saw a 3D first person shooter game for the first time, Doom (video). It was a must-have. But first I needed a PC.

Not much later, Javed and Andreas went to the northern part of Sweden to do the mandatory military service (which I did in 1996, a couple of years later). I "took care" of Javed's apartment (that is, played on his PC). On the occasional weekends Javed got to go home, he often would download new games from dial-up database servers and leave notes to me urging me to try them. I guess it was in a way soothing for him to feel that someone was at home when he was forced away to cold and darkness.

We agreed on a fact sheet for those early years of PC gaming:

Not really any co-operative action going on there, but the titles were heavy on nostalgia for both of us. I am tempted to start going through some titles in the list, but that would be wandering off topic a bit too much.

In the end of 1994 I bought my first PC. I went for the new 486DX2 processor with 4 megabytes of memory and 430 MB hard-drive. The following year was riddled with first-person shooter games in the legacy of Doom, for instance:

We were some friends that played Doom and Duke Nukem 3D over unpractical dial-up modems, but strangely I never did that with Javed. Guess he was abroad those periods. However, I've dug up some evidence from IRC chat logs from 1995 where we discussed games and where plans to multi-play at least were in the making (Javed is Socrates and I'm Veron):

Honorable mention from 1995:

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (video)

In August 1995, Javed traveled to Evansville, USA, to study.

The Years Adrift 1996-2012

Our communication became sparse some months after Javed went abroad. My entire 1996 consisted of military service, and from there I got a job beginning of 1997 and moved to my first apartment. There were some postcards and e-mail being sent and we continued to chat some on IRC.

I haven't found any relevant digital artifacts from the following couple of years. He was back in Sweden in July 2000 when his mother passed away, but that visit was all about practicalities. We seem to have made some effort in playing Counter-Strike later, though, but I don't remember much of it.

Things were more saddled when he returned in 2002. We had fairly regular LAN parties in my tiny one-room apartment. I believe we maxed out at six computers with those clunky old CRT screens one time. Extra tables made some computers somewhat hard to get to. We played a lot of Quake III Arena (video) and Unreal Tournament (video) and Javed impressed and frustrated us with his quick reflexes, which I from this point on every now and then frivolously would complain about as an unfair advantage to us hard workers.

Sometime in the end of 2002 Javed went back to the US again. Followed a long period without much contact at all. I remember that Javed was playing EverQuest Online Adventures like a maniac during this period and actually managing to sell in-game equipment for quite large amounts of real money.

In 2007, Andreas started to work in Washington and moved in to the basement of Javed's house. I believe this is when they played Star Wars Galaxies, a massive multiplayer online role playing game that I couldn't be inspired enough to try. We did, however, play another MMORPG: Dark Age of Camelot, but it was centered around grinding (doing stuff just for the sake of leveling), so it didn't last long.

I mainly used computer games as a way to relax and re-focus these years. The main source for inspiration was training (martial arts and weight lifting) and the main consumer of spare time was the house I bought with Anna, which I partly renovated the hell out. I have come to realize that Javed thought I had forgotten about him around this period, but I was simply deep into this other stuff:

In 2012 we wrote some back and forth about the mega-hit The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a single player game that we both enjoyed (and that I played in later years with community revamped mods).

The following year we would finally meet again in real life, so to speak, and a renewed friendship era begun.

Hundreds and Hundred Hours 2013-2018

Visiting one of the old basket courts in Kallhäll.

After Javed's visit to Sweden in June 2013, we never really lost contact. Just a couple of weeks later we played Borderlands 2. For some reason, though, that game never captivated me. I believe I gave it a fair shot with four hours of playtime. Javed, though, would eventually pour 92 hours into playing it, so it obviously struck a nerve in him.

Not long after our Borderlands 2 sessions I moved again. Buying a house and selling a house is quite a task, so not much gaming was going on that autumn and early winter. But, around Christmas, we got to talk a lot - some wine might have added to the atmosphere - and casually started to play the game Natural Selection 2, a blend of first player shooter and real-time strategy. We had a total blast. Something from within, perhaps from childhood, just unlocked that evening, for both Javed and me. I guess we both needed to experience this trouble-free joyfulness as grown-ups.
I will always treasure this evening as a significant event in my life.

Those days we also played a handful of more games:

Starbound. A two-dimensional exploration and building game. Javed had played it with other people for some time but had started to grow tired of it when we gave it a shot together. I thought it was pretty boring from the get-go.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. A multiplayer hack and slash first person war game. The game itself was not that fun, but we made it quite entertaining by playing it in a very reckless manner.
Counter Strike: Global Offensive. I think he managed to convince me to buy it or bought it for me. Have had it started a total of 61 minutes, so...no. But Javed played it for more than 20 hours. I guess the teamwork factor made it worthwhile to him.
DayZ. A survival video game with zombies that was in an "early access" state (and had a proper release just days ago when writing this). As a beta version it wasn't that playable, but we probably would have enjoyed it now, sadly.

Anyway, from that point on, it grew into a habit to have frequent contact. In a way I think we subconsciously tried to repeat that original Natural Selection 2 session, although it was mission impossible since every later attempt never could have that profound liberating effect.

I have collected about all available data from our shared gaming networks and will continue just to list the games we tried or played from 2014 and onward in chronological order, with a short comment attached to it.

Early 2014

Rising Storm. We were kind of desperate to find something besides Natural Selection 2 to dig into, but this first-person shooter was not it.
Dead Space 3. Very tight in atmosphere, but really designed to be a single player game with the co-op ability as just an extra flavor. We had an hour of decent fun that evening, but nothing more.
Warframe. This was free to play. After half an hour we realized it was not it.
Portal 2. Bang! Now this game unlocked our minds and intraperson dynamics to the max. We crushed it in a multi-session co-op frenzy. I would love to have a gameplay video of this. The memory of it belongs to the same treasure box as Natural Selection 2.

Portal 2.

PlanetSide 2. Well, we gave it a fair shot I would say with some 30 hours of playtime. It was a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter free to play (and kind of pay to win) that both frustrated to quit and motivated us to carry on. One time, when our hoard of teammates behaved annoyingly stupid in a key situation, Javed cursed wild and loud in Swedish, screaming all kinds of bad words - and suddenly got an important phone call right in the climax of it. He was looking for a job and a recruiter called. Javed picked up immediately without bothering to disengage the mic and soon got into a very technical summary of his professional experience and knowledge, in English. The contrast was hilarious. Just seconds earlier he had been spewing obscene Swedish words over some dumb kids in a fictious environment.
Monaco. A top-down perspective puzzle like game. We hoped it would trigger our teamwork machinery, but it wasn't that engaging.
Far Cry 3. Awesome single player game. Decent co-op experience. We tried to make the most out of it, and it lasted for three of four evenings, judging by the play time.
Awesomenauts. A 2D platform fighting game that Javed got bored with faster than I did, for a change. We gave it one, or perhaps two, evenings.
The Elder Scrolls Online. Since we both were fans of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim one might think that this massive multiplayer online role playing game would make for a great alternative. We signed up for the free beta, but it was a disappointment.
WildStar. Also a massive multiplayer online role playing game (although in futuristic setting). Also a beta. Also did not captivate us.
Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. I played this game with another friend, Magnus. We did the military service together and that was a theme that stuck, one might say. Ever since Tom Clancy's Rainbow_Six (2002), me and Magnus were on the lookout for realistic battle simulation games. In the spring of 2014, Javed joined us a couple of times when we played the quite entertaining game Insurgency.
Star Wars: Battlefront II (Classic). For some vague reason we bought this old game that Javed once had played. It was released in 2005 and felt like a ten year old game. We gave up after half an hour.

Late 2014

Spintires. I was asocial in an online perspective during the summer, but in the autumn, we got back to business with this title. It was a frustrating game that got you to run Russian military trucks through very muddy terrain. The co-op factor consisted of slowly trying to get to one another - because the other one just got stuck again - and had to be towed - again. We really wanted to enjoy it, but it was just too painful to play.
System Shock 2. An old classic that actually had co-op, but it hadn't aged well enough.
Castle Crashers. 2D platform hack-and-slash-and-talk-about-life. We beat it in 10 hours, and that was it.
Tabletop Simulator. A board game simulator. We both enjoyed playing board games when growing up. With this simulator, we could at least try doing it while being continents apart. We would come back to this game every now and then, and also play with others.
Orion Prelude. No Wikipedia entry for this one. To no surprise.

So, in conclusion, 2014 really didn't bring that much excitement after Natural Selection 2. Portal 2 turned out to be the highlight. Thinking about it the teamwork machine, I feel that Javed may have taken this dynamic more for granted than I did. I was often kind of baffled after a session where it had blossomed, but Javed felt more...indifferently content, if that makes any sense. Maybe his competitive spirit added some small amount of dissonance. I often consciously would let Javed take charge (if not being stubborn about something...), but in those co-op flow moments I tended to just grab the steering wheel, not caring much about hierarchies and egos.

2015

Garry's Mod. A popular modification of the old classic game Half-Life 2 (a very good - in fact nearly ground breaking - game from 2004). We couldn't find a reason behind the hype, though.
Left 4 Dead 2. A simple, yet fun, co-op first person zombie shooter. Me and Magnus had poured in hours into this, and Javed occasionally joined us this year to try to beat some of the harder missions.
Sniper Elite III. Decent co-op fun for a few evenings.
Mass Effect 3. One of my favorite games and go-to when needing to focus on something other than every day stuff. Even though I played a lot of multiplayer, Javed would only occasionally join me. Kind of my personal thing.
Far Cry 4. We had more fun with this title than we had with Far Cry 3, but it soon got rather boring just being able to do the side missions in co-op. I think you can play the main missions in co-op in Far Cry 5, released in 2018, but anyway...
Dirty Bomb. We tried the beta version. Wasn't special enough.
Sniper Elite: Zombie Army 2. Headshotting zombies en massé was addictive. Javed had other gaming friends in the US that also got involved playing this.
Battlefield 4. Javed had played Battlefield 4 a lot before we started to do it together. He had impressive stats using just a .357 pistol (like 1000 kills or so). It was a very competitive multiplayer game and he really had to use his reflexes and technique to the max. Our play time added up to a total of about 40 hours.
Savage Lands. Early access beta survival game that looked promising. We were four players talking over Teamspeak and tried to last as long as possible, but the play was very limited.
Evolve Stage 2. I think Javed bought this to me because I was reluctant and he felt inspired. It seemed like just another game. It had some special ideas but lasted just one evening.
Marvel Heroes Omega. Javed really needed to connect through light-hearted play during this particular period, and the only game he managed to find was this one. I never enjoyed it but gave it a couple of evenings for his sake.
Dying Light. Now we are talking! One of the best co-op games ever made. We played it a lot and would return to it in 2016 to play it with our British comrades on stream.
Star Wars Battlefront. A title we had been waiting for. Even eagerly trying out the beta version one weekend. We had very entertaining sessions with Star Wars Battlefront, in spite that the developers did their best to "balance" it unplayable. I have fond memories from us playing this game, always racing for the top positions in the scoreboards.

Star Wars: Battlefront

Elite Dangerous. Pretty steep learning curve. We gave it a couple of hours and said we would return to it but never did.

An intense year when measuring frequency of contact. We both had quite much to handle on an every-day basis and really needed this distraction and outlet. Gaming-wise, I would say we tried to have fun, but didn't quite succeed until Dying Light and Star Wars Battlefront entered the show.

2016

The Division. Up with Dying Light as one of the best co-op games ever made. After playing for some time, Javed got the idea to try and team up with others. That's when we hooked up with Guy and Andy. Guy is a streamer, so most of our gameplay eventually ended up on YouTube. My aim is to edit this treasure of videos in various ways. I did the clip above just for fun when Javed was still around. Anyway, it was very fun playing with these fellows; Guy always brought a good mood and crafty one-liners to the sessions, while Andy patiently researched most of the strategic aspects of the game at hand (while being a really nice guy, which triggered us to taunt him). Neither Javed nor I had the patience to dig into details like Andy did.
Overwatch. As evident in the beginning of this Overwatch video (which I edited last year), Javed bought Overwatch for all four of us. We had a ton of fun with it. I have edited more Overwatch gameplay, but in such a time-consuming way (like working on a scoreboard) that I wonder if I ever will be able to complete it.

Overwatch. Actual gameplay.

Worms Revolution. Someone got the idea to play this turn-based strategy game. It was rather entertaining, although a bit slow. I have in my editing queue.
Blood and Bacon. One time when I had Magnus over, we talked all three and eventually chose to download a cheap game that had got tremendously positive reviews. Turned out it was all a joke. The game was purposely done hilariously bad and all the reviewers did their part of the show.
Don't Starve Together. We tried this popular title one evening, but it did not grow on us.
Rocket League. This could have been a title for us to embrace and seek perfection in, but we both kind of lost focus on gaming in the end of 2016. Also, one evening when we were playing, I was spicing it up with some wine. Javed got tempted but only had a bottle of Tequila at home. He started to drink it straight and suddenly gaming got really competitive. One kid in the opposite team, "Chef Doug", started to taunt us in voice messages and then they annoyingly won the match. In the next match we were out to reclaim our "dignity" but then Chef Doug lost his team mate, making it unfair. Here our personalities took us to two different positions: Javed wanted to prey on the advantage that were given to us in order to crush the bastard. I, on the other hand, can only rarely value an unfair victory. Thus, I lost motivation and stopped trying. The situation made Javed furious and ended with the one and only rage quit. I could hear his headset crashing onto the desktop just before the connection was lost. Next day, I got an e-mail. He said he was sorry and that what happened was very unnecessary. "I get that way sometimes when I'm out to win, and it didn't exactly help drinking half a bottle of Tequila." Also, I knew he had other things to ponder that troubled him and made him somewhat unbalanced. Anyway, no hard feelings, but we only played Rocket League a few times more after this (but I still play it every now and then).

Rocket League.

Conclusion: One might say we went for quality, not quantity in 2016. Overall, this was our best gaming year, although it kind of faded in the end.

2017

Ghost Recon Wildlands. We wanted a challenge and went for the hardest setting. Turned out the enemy could perfectly see and hit us through cover and grass and the gameplay soon became just the same rinse and repeat.
Orcs Must Die! 2. We were just seeking to play something to distract us from everyday life. This blend of a shooter and tower defense game had received a good rating, so we bought it. We did not enjoy it and both had problems focusing on it.
Call of Duty: WWII. Demanding mundane tasks and concerns got me off social interaction and computer games for quite a long time. When we eventually reconnected and got the latest version of Call of Duty the good old teamwork dynamic got going. I actually got a bit blown away by having the sensation of "everything is possible, let's go!" again. It was like a revelation of creative flow that I had forgotten what it felt to experience, and after our first gaming session I expressed, internally and to others around me, what a special connection I had with Javed. But the actual game very soon turned out to be repetitive and endless, making it feel meaningless to play.
Star Wars Battlefront II. The anticipated new version of one of the games we had the most fun playing. Javed stated passionately that "I love Star Wars", and that sincere, kind of innocent, announcement stuck with me (and so I'm using the chance to write it here). Because of the time difference, he was still at work when I was at home in the late evening the day of the release. I wrote an e-mail to him, dated November 17: "I have just tried it for like 15 minutes, and now I want to ask you something: When the hell are you back at home and how much wine do you have?" But this version turned out to be more frustrating than fun. Unlocking things gave way more advantages comparing to the earlier version, so it almost felt like pay-to-win. A common scenario was to outperform an adversary in hits and technique and still loose the encounter. My inspiration faded and Javed often got enraged. We continued playing it every now and then but mostly as a backdrop when talking about other things.

For the record: Perhaps we often would consume alcohol when playing, but I want to make the case that only rarely we got noticeably intoxicated. It was mainly for the relaxing effect and atmosphere. Like having a glass of red to dinner. Both of us scaled down the consumption in 2017, and most of the time we would joke about having wine or drinks.

End game

Grand Theft Auto V. On December 28, we decided to try the multiplayer mode of Grand Theft Auto V. We formed our group, Kallhall Boys, and rolled out i San Andreas for some virtual thug life. I had just bought a fan heater to warm my chilly room, and it's blowing on me when writing this (cold again). We had fun that evening. A bit like finding back to early 2016. Javed felt optimistic. It's quite unsettling in the broader context that we drove around in the game, mostly with him at the steering wheel. I want to mention a little silly thing that we laughed about. We were going at high speed in the countryside. The radio was playing some annoying tune, so I tried to find the button to shut it off. What I soon found, however, was the button to exit the car, so to our surprise my character just abandoned ship. Anyway, Javed was keen to find Easter eggs, that is in-game planted hidden messages and things. He had some leads we were chasing (to no avail).

GTA V. I started the game again to get some screenshots. At the crossroads here I tried to shut off the radio.

I summarized the hour counts for all these games we played from about 2013. 662 hours. It isn't an exact number of the amount of playing time we had, but it is a hint that we did spend a lot of time together, doing what we felt contributed to give life meaning: Going shoulder to shoulder to battle routine and desolation.

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