Gaming Chat Remembered

Real life ran away with me.  Of course, it would be foolish to disclose anything about my real life here.  I still don't know if google can properly send anybody here actually; if this place is effective, or for that matter, if anyone who was a part of the Gaming Chat days looks back on them as fondly as I do.

I'd like to finish telling my end of it, but realistically that might not continue.

In the case that I don't look here again, I've made another place.

http://www.reddit.com/r/GamingChat/

Open to all.  I want to hear from all of you that are still looking back.

Hoping to one day, be able to put it all together.

If any of you stumble across this, I can be found @fistmissile as well.

Yes, when it rains it pours.

I log our of my "square" email account.

You know?  The one that goes like: [email protected]

Log into another one, which leads me to the ones that I don't check so often, and in one of those I see that I've written an email to Tiph Nightshade that she will never read.  Sooner than later I find myself looking at the roleplaying "Rules" section of her archived web page.

We were never too close.  Perhaps we corresponded a little, but anyone I held email contact with more than a decade ago has shed that skin.  We did speak a little, but when the "game" changed styles, the she was part of the future and I would fade into the past.

I would consider the founding heads of AIMRP/Gaming Chat to be Tiphy, Darrian, TheBlakkRose, LuWatchman, AkashaRomanus, and Akari Chapelo.  As I recall, these people collided during that period of inflation in the winter of 2000, and the style of RPing was ::hit::, but the whole fun of roleplaying wasn't in the fighting, so much as it was interacting, or at least it was for most.

I'm not sure who introduced freeform.

I explained ::hit:: in an earlier post, but basically it was the beginning combat system.  Conflict facilitates change.  As the number of characters to interact with grew, romances and interpersonal conflicts blossomed, the ::hit:: system wasn't so fun if you weren't interacting with a stranger.

Free Form was a solution to this.  If you just wanted to write and expand the mythos of yourself and the characters around you, this was a great way to  do that.  The others became good friends with eachother, and they transitioned to the free form style seemlessly.  Instead of a quick sentence announcing ones intent, free form allowed for more of a turn based typing of a paragraph.

I consider Free Form to apply to combat only.  This may be disputable, but if one is interacting with another in a nonviolent manner, then ::hit:: isn't really necessary.  Convey what you're doing in whatever number of characters that you please.  It was in fighting that Free Form stood apart.

::hit:: was a battle of words typed per minute.  It wasn't fancy.  Victory seldom is, and for those like me, who played to win, and bragged when they did, this was the best way.

Free Form was a style of combat where two people came together and wrote a story.  In an ideal world, the outcome was not decided, or for that matter was entirely predetermined.  I've even read rule sets that included an impartial referee, but that must have come after my time, because when there are two parties with legitimate issues between one another, then "coming together to write a story" doesn't work so well.

In a perfect world, or at least when playing among friends, Free Form combat depended on the principle that you could only vouch for your character in a post.  One could not determine how a person's physical presence was affected.  If something was to happen to your character, ideally, the owner of that character was the one to decide.

Example: Two characters get in a gun fight under Free Form rules; you have two people, taking turns, typing out as eloquently as possible how they are aiming at and firing upon each other, and then in response, deciding how the attacks that the opponent's paragraph described as aimed toward them ended up.

Now, this DEPENDS on impartiality, which is probably why the referee idea was later introduced, because in every pivotal Free Form battle I have ever participated in or witnessed, someone eventually started stating what was happening to the opponent, and usually out of mutual hatred, this became a game of oneupsmanship until a character lie dead.

::hit:: was pretty concrete.  The post order didn't lie.  In the parlance of the show Lost, what happened happened.

Free Form really depended on your witnesses, or willingness to take hits voluntarily.

Free Form blurred the lines and I didn't like it at all.

The others all leaned toward it, because they hung out  together and even liked each other, and mostly I just liked to fight.

It was what I'd built my reputation on, and with the nature of Free Form being so open, so too was the concept of godmoding.  It didn't matter how incredibly powerful ones character was if the battle was decided mutually, until egos got in the way.

In early 2000, things moved quickly and with Gaming Chat's intense growth, factions started to form and mutate. The Teenage Knights, which was started by Lu became the Watchman family and from the Watchman family came "The Elites".  Tiphareth and Darrian got married and she took his last name.  I had grown fascinated with Akari Chapelo, the psychic blue cat, who was apparently some kind of vampire animagus, so I trained her to be a gunslinger like Justice Kinkad and myself.

As Free Form grew, and the power of The Elites increased; this was around the time when I first heard about The Hunters.  Honestly, while I'd like to continue typing, there's too much and this post will  get too long.

As I age, keeping track of all these different internet manifestations gets continuously trickier.

I used to have a website, blogs and social networking accounts, and with these I could pour out my thoughts to the internet with startling clarity; images and whole paragraphs of inner dialogue public for the world.

Somewhere, I guess that all began to make me feel too exposed, and I don't feel that the internet is for that purpose.

I made my beacon for the Gaming Chat community, out of some hope to find you all again, or create a record of what we did, and some time ago I started talking about what things were like from my perspective.  I guess I'd hoped that one of you could come along and dispute my account, but this never happened.

I'll be the first to say that I don't understand Tumblr.  I'm using it as a blog because my old blogspot ones grew out of my control somehow.  What remains of them are they types of things I've always done.  Get drunk, be cryptic.  Who knows what it meant?  What I wanted?

That is irrelevant.

I'll try and complete my account of things here.  While I've covered what I believe to be the meat and potatoes of the ::hit:: era, I've chronicled nothing, and I started this thing to do that.

When time frees up, I'll make my bold claims, and that will be the last time. I promise.

I think back to being 15.  My cirrux 133 mhz comp stomper.  So much of my character was an amalgamation of old experiences and I had weaved this into such a long back story that I'd spend hours typing it out to tell to just strangers.  I can only imagine Akari or Dauthi just clicking the "X".  "Shit, he's telling it again."

Time that could have been spent living in a real moment.

This thing is different though, in that its not about me or my shitty character.  Its about that community, but that would sure be easier if one or two of you actually showed.

Hiya!

I guess the whole reason that I put this thing out there was to try and organize any of the former Gaming Chat RPers who might be curious.

The only other hub that I've seen that shows some activity is Tiphy Nightshade's archived site, so I wanted to put something out there that could maybe show up on a google search.

I was around in the early days, but Gaming Chat got really huge, and I got lost in the shuffle, but I guess my claim to fame was training Akari.

Of course I haven't spoken to her for years, but back in 2003 I damn near moved in with her.

Anyway, I gotta go, but its good to hear from anyone who knew GC for what it was.

After the new millennium had begun, Gaming Chat was in full swing, playing host to all manner of amazing and strange characters, diversifying with each wave.

When I arrived, it was Vampires and Vampire type things.  Tortured souls, sipping blood wine.  In the dead of winter and into the fall, all bet were off.  I'd parked my airship, bought a car, and started building the Gunslinger Ranch.  Gaming Chat was changing and the mayhem has begun to transcend it.  My friend, Justice Kinkad had taken off on his own, becoming part of the growing group of new RPers, and I think he was the one who told me about the Teenage Knights.  Perhaps there had been guilds before them; I know that on occasion I would indoctrinate a new Gunslinger, but it was never with the intention of gaining an ally, and more along the lines of helping somebody else's character develop in a different way.  The Teenage Knights were led by Teenage Knight Lu, and while I don't believe the group lasted long under that name, it would evolve several times, ushering in changes to AIM RP that I didn't always agree with.

It's patchy, and I don't remember how it went, but I know that I sparred with Teenage Knight Lu on that first time we met, and as I recall it came to a draw.  Of course, the style was ::hit:: so it may have just ended in dispute.

Lu would build strong alliances with powerful characters like Darrian Nightshade and  Dauthi Seraphim and as his clan progressed, AIM RP would come to loosely revolve around them.

I came to know a psychic blue cat that I adored.

Surely by now I knew SephyNoMiko, who would later become Tiphareth Nightshade.  She would become a pillar of the AIM RP communtiy, running the most extensive and longest lasting AIM RP archive and tribute page I know of.  I spoke with her regularly, exchanged emails, and after all of this time I have no idea what we were talking about.  I guess it's like that with many of them.  The difference is that I can still contact Tiphareth, and that makes her unique, because she is the only one.

As I strive to chain my memories together, contrasted against the way my social life began to develop; the attempt is futile.  I only remember the overview, events from my perspective.  While this account of how AIM RP's localized Gaming Chat chronology is just mine, I stand behind the majority of what I've said thus far, aside from how I've phrased it (I will doubtlessly go back and revise my previous posts) but, and I said this before; from here on out, it's just the way I saw it.  Purely.

When the idea of memorializing the story of Gaming Chat came to me last (as it does about twice a year) I was already riding the idea of tracking the "old heads", in an attempt to tell this tale by consensus.  

I don't know if the AIM service has paired down my buddy list over the years, but when I started my account, the buddy list was stored locally on my hard drive.  Over the past decade, that list has become part of a server somewhere and over years of neglect I've not been able to track the progression that certain aspects of that list have become forgotten.  I may even require a very old version of AIM to be able to see some of it, if it has been preserved at all.

The point I'm trying to make, is that of the 230 buddies on my list which survived to this day, and of the 900 buddy lists I'm on (not counting the ones my screen name was sold to, lets say 650 of them) I can't find these people anymore.  The story can't be preserved impartially. Vital incidents, meetings and connections; these are stories others must tell, and this is my current call out to them.

The chatroom we all met in, our common point, was AOL's sponsored chatroom called Gaming Chat.  I'm sure that most of the people who happened across it were searching for someone to talk about videogames with, much like I was when I found it, but as it had turned out, the place had become something else completely.

It wasn't some discussion area anymore.  By December of 1999, it was undisputedly the center of the America Online Instant Messenger role playing community.

Gaming Chat was a bar.  Some standard dive in the middle of an undisclosed area, surrounded by nothing which had been described in depth.  As far as what had been surely established, it had a bar in it, which at times roleplayers staffed, (generally anyone who tried to assume a bartender character was quickly killed) tables and chairs, I usually assumed that they were made of wood, because then you could smash them and use the bits as weapons or a stake.  There were rafters, which were always a cool place to bring a fight up to, as well as the dwelling place of my favorite character.  There was a jukebox, which gained popularity as enterances started to get complex.  When required there was a parking lot, which I made great use of during the time that my character drove a car.

The most vitally important and widely accepted fact about Gaming Chat as the perceived bar that it represented however, was it's inherent magical properties.

When roleplaying an any gaming fashion, be it DND or Robotech or whatever, attention to detail is vital to the immersion, so when somebody does something like smashes another guy through a table in a bar, or in my case drives a car through the wall, that would generally need to be recorded and remembered for future reference.  A good Dungeon Master for DND would even add repercussions, like "the barkeep, hands you a bill for the table/wall," or maybe even taking out time to fix the damage to the area by yourself.

Gaming Chat didn't have that problem.  You leave and come back later, and it was generally accepted that the place would mend it's self.  I'm pretty sure you could burn it to the ground, fuck, maybe I did burn it to the ground, but based on the fact that not everyone was there all the time; that we couldn't all possibly know if it had been burned to cinders and there was no DM to remind us of such an occurrence, it was just an unspoken and unopposed rule that the bar represented in Gaming Chat was just magic, and would fix it's self when one instance or another of RPing had occurred.

This made it the perfect forum for a knock down drag out brawl.

Of course, this was indicative of the whole spirit of what AIM RP was becoming.  No limits, or at the least very few.

You could be anything that you wanted to be, from any universe, any continuity, any time and place, species.  The only restriction was on deathblows and modes.

Godmoding was generally frowned upon, but as the style came into question and became due to change, became slightly more acceptabe.  The main idea was always that you couldn't dictate what someone else was doing, because that would undermine the spirit of what we were all doing.

Deedlit had some boyfriend called Id something or other, who later became IdAwakens.  He was derived from an endgame boss from Xenogears.  After I took it out of him we didn't see him around much.  In the days of the ::hit:: style I did a lot of that.  Some cocky fucker showed up and I put them down.  One after another.

It was during this time that I exposed my friend Chris to Gaming Chat and his character JusticeKinkad fit right in.  As to his adventures and exploits, I cannot elaborate.  It's just one of those things.  I could tell you in detail about my interactions with a prefect stranger, but a guy I had known for a few years, and would go on to know for many more, and I can't tell you much about his character.  I know he was a Saiyan, like from Dragon Ball Z, and he could go Super Saiyan when he needed to. That and I'd tought him how to be a gunslinger.

He was my partner, not like we took any windy walks, but we were pals.  Anything I remember, he could corroborate in some form, aside from the things that predate his time.  Arguably, he was more important than me when it came down to it.  The people I was at odds with, he ended up in much more direct conflict with.  Of course that was yet to happen.

The last major vampire to become a cornerstone of Gaming Chat was Akasha Romanus.  It was likely an earlier name (I think it was AkashaTFV), and I'm not sure how we met, but I seem to recall getting along with her.  She was really the last of them though, I think that was what the TFV was.  It stood for "The Final Vampire" or something.  There were other vampires to come, but only a few of them mattered.  I do take credit for one thing though: after me, more unique characters began to appear.  Fleshed out characters defined not by their race, but by their actions.  You did not have to be a super being to go toe to toe with one.  Of course, that took the balls to stand up to an immortal when there was little clear reason other then one's own ingenuity for them not to tear your heart out.

 Of course, even when a new human showed up, they still had some kind of fuck-you powerfulness.  I was the only guy with no obvious magic to lean on.  Just guns, later a sword.  Mostly just guns.

In the next couple of months, SephyNoMiko appeared.  She was something of a female Sephiroth, and became a lynch pin of the Gaming Chat community.  Darrian would outlast me by a longshot, having been in Gaming Chat before I was and long after I left, but those two, Darrian and Sephy (she would come to be known as Tiphareth) had something in the cards later on for sure.

Now, I've been trying to find all of these people that I've mentioned thus far, for a grip, because this is where I get fuzzy.  For fuck's sake, I've probably already butchered it.  I'll go ahead and be prideful where I feel it to be justified, but those times are running out fast, and the rest of this story is mostly for other people to tell.  I'll keep going on my end, but goddamn, I wish I could find you guys.  I'll never let go of the notion that Gaming Chat as it was, had changed because of my arrival.  It was a small change, but I think it was good.

Teenage Knight Lu changed things too.  It seemed to happen over night, but that man dealt in drastic reality raping change...

The easiest way to say something without dropping character was to do this:

ShadowBlade54644:  ((Says something in real life))

So that was IRL.  Any actual communications between Muns.

A Mun is the actual person behind the screen name.  For instance I would have been Kevin-Mun.  In many cases, this was the most I knew of the real person behind the people I was RPing with.

I never really though too hard about it at the time of AIM RP because it was clear what it meant, but out of curiosity I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it comes from the word Mundane.  It even stated that this was used in text based roleplaying, with no particular reference to us, but it was still amusing to me.  Of course we couldn't have been the only ones to use this terminology but to me it still feels like it was just ours.

In a sense, knowing my peers almost exclusively in character blurred the lines of reality for me.  I knew that there was real people in a chair somewhere interacting with me through text, but I didn't know them at all.  I purely knew the character that they were playing though.  Strangely, the people I knew the least were the ones who played characters that mine had romances with.

Looking back on those types of things, it seems very strange.  Who knows who some of them may actually have been, and from time to time I'm curious about that.

If it had not been for the return of DrUbAcCa, I don't know if I'd have joined the RP in Gaming Chat with Darrian and Deedlit, but even before I was in Gaming Chat, I was certainly RPing with her.  Maybe that was what made it seem as though I had to involve myself.

DrUbAcCa was the bounty I'd had during the days of AOL's "Pilot's Downtime" RP chatroom, long before the Gaming Chat thing came together.  It was a quick loss against an experienced roleplayer.  A friend and myself had hunted her down, but we didn't know that it was a female.  I believe that our posts were voided on that basis.  We were attacking a man, and she wasn't one, so she trounced us quickly and escaped.

I had again forgotten it was a woman when I found her on AIM right before the time I'd started RPing in Gaming Chat.  I tracked her down in an IM window with the intent to finish what I'd started in Pilot's Downtime years before.

I reintroduced myself, and she had remembered the altercation from years before.  She explained her position at the time, and it had turned out that the bounty that had been placed on her head was by a jealous ex-boyfriend.  I apologized and she accepted.  Soon after I stumbled upon Gaming Chat, and fought Darrian Nightshade.

After the fight, I returned to DrUbAcCa, wounded and hurting.  She cleaned me up, decided to be in love with me and so we were an item.  So, I was 15, and having my first true in-character experience with cyber-sex... sort of.  Cyber sex by proxy perhaps?  After all, it was in character.  For all I knew DrUbAcCa was some married woman in real life, or even a man.  With a character between us, and no knowledge of who the person on either end of the keyboard was, did it really matter?

I can only assume that there are videogames now that render this type of thing graphically, and it seems ridiculous, but something about typing it out made it somewhat personal.

This is an archive of the Roleplay section of my old Geocities page.  There's no longer much left of it.  At one time this page held profiles for most of the old heads of AIM RP, but at some point I got drunk and wiped it all out expect for the characters of people I knew personally, and that is the phase which is archived.  The links are dead, as well as the link to the art gallery.  At some point I managed to run through and grab all the scans of my old RP Artwork before it was obliterated.

If I'd have known that I'd go back and look for these things later, I'd have done more work to preserve this webpage in its best form.  Now, the body of it is archived in it's final spitefully designed form.  Angry at the world and festering.

It makes me want to create a new one, maybe not just for that, but a place of my own to be the way I want it to.  Everything nowadays is a facebook or a twitter or a Google+, but it's all social media aggregation.  None of it is just devoted and sexy.  It is all just within some corporaton's interface.  Kind of like this.

I am unsure as to how long AIM's Gaming Chat had been a home to role players before I arrived.  For all I know they had been in there for a while, or perhaps not long at all.

I know there wasn't many of them, and the ones that were there were almost exclusively Vampires.

Darrian Nightshade (dariannightshade) seemed to be the top guy to some extent.  He was a great fighter and the ladies adored him.  He was played by a guy named John Machelinski, but beyond that I don't know much about the man behind the character.  As I recall he usually wore a suit, and beyond his vampyric powers was proficient with melee weapons and firearms, but the only time I can recall him using a gun was when he shot me in the hand.  After our fight (my first AIM RP battle) they impressed upon me that the Vampires in AIM RP were not evil and we made peace.

Deedlit Watchman (Deedlit Watchman) was there as well, but under her original name which has somehow stricken itself from my buddy list over the past decade.  She was a vampire version of Lodoss War's Deedlit, making her a Vampire elf.  In character she would later go on to "date" one of my close friend's characters, but in real life she got pregnant and sort of faded out of the scene.  She was still around under a couple different names (Deedlit Felstorm, Deedlit Watchman) in one capacity or another for a while, but I don't remember seeing her much after 2001.  She was the one who pulled the stake out of Darrian's chest, allowing him to reanimate before berating me about unilaterally assaulting a bunch of Vampires who were minding their own business.

The Mexican Vampire, Lonewolf was there.  We would fight eachother for fun for a long time after that.  I cannot find his screen name on my buddy list, which would stand to reason.  As these things have become more complicated, linked together and merged with other messenger services, many of the screen names on my buddy list have changed to different things.  Some of them have become the real names of people, with no indication of what they used to be known by, and some have doubtlessly become abandoned. Nobody uses AIM anymore.  I don't even dare sign on with it, seeing as the original software seems equivalent to adware.

Somehow my buddy icon has been preserved through some avenue or another, but on Pidgin, which I use currently, it doesn't show.

Someone I didn't see after the first month was a guy called xVampyreLordx, who had a stately aura about him.  He kind of sold me on Vampires being okay to be around. I couldn't tell you what we talked about, but for someone I only knew shortly, he was someone I respected early on.

I had retooled my character (ShadowBlade54644) since the Pilots Downtime days (I was just Blade54644 then) to a desperado type, modeled closely after the Stephen King character Roland Deschain.  The idea was just to be a human, and rely on guns and machinery to survive, and of course being a master shootist was helpful.  

Being surrounded by vampires, I felt like it set me apart to be the only character that wasn't in some way overpowered.  I had no idea that by this small expansion of adding one badass character who was totally different to the mix, it would open up pandora's box in the universe of AIM RP, and thereby allow characters outside the bubble of vampires roleplaying with vampires into the Gaming Chat's mythos.  

Some time ago I threw a message in a bottle out to the internet, and this is the person who found it.  They suggested that I read this.  They loved Gaming Chat as I did, and it is a testament to how fast AIM RP was growing because this person knew all the same people I did, and we didn't know each other.

Well, I've always been long winded... here we go.

I wandered into Gaming Chat on AOL's Instant Messenger for no particular reason in October of 1999.  I was borrowing a friend's TCP-IP settings and was still feeling out the full extent of the internet at the time, so after getting a hold of AIM I sort of just started looking around for someone to talk to about something or another.

It was safe to say that with a 56k modem in my 133 megahertz Cirrux processor powered doom computer that the internet was working better for me at this point then it ever had, and I'd been on around the internet pretty consistently since 1994.  Every image, regardless of size, would load in under a minute, and in 1999 this was a fantastic feat, especially when searching for porn.

I had maybe 2 friends on my AIM buddy list.MAYBE.  If there truly was that many, they were both people I knew personally.

Anyway, Gaming Chat.

I didn't find a soul in gaming chat that wanted to talk about games with me.  This came as little surprise as most of the AOL chat rooms were like this.  What caught my attention were the colons.

No, not like the colons that carry chyme to your bowels. The keyboard kind.  Grouped in 2's on either side of a descriptive sentence, like so;

::Kevin looks over at his gray cat, which is stalking about the room meowing::

In an AIM chat window is used to look something like this;

ShadowBlade54644:::Continues typing::

and in chat room role play or "RP" this is how you described an action.  If you were going to just say something, then you'd type it out without the colon because when you used the 2 colons on each side of a sentence to describe an action, then it was relatively clear that from that point forward you were in character.

A couple of the people in Gaming Chat were RPing.

I knew this because I'd had previous experience.  In 1996 there was a chat room on regular AOL (the kind that you had to pay for) where people did this, and as a lifelong pen and paper role player, I'd been invited. It was Star Wars themed, the room was called 'Pilot's Downtime' and a friend and I had a short lived adventure as a part of the Empire.

The system was a little bit different, but the fundamentals of declaring an action were the same.

I watched these 3 or 4 in Gaming chat.  They seemed to be sparring.  Fighting amongst themselves.  Where as in Pilot's Downtime there were dice bots (you could type in "//roll" and a bot in the room would roll dice for you to determine combat) Gaming Chat had a different system for fighting.

One's weapon must be described as at the ready and then the attack would have to be described, with target and triggering action.  After this, one would have to cement that the attack had hit it's target before the opponent could post with a dodge.

ShadowBlade54644:  ::Draws his revolver from it's right hip holster::

ShadowBlade54644: ::Aims at opponent's face, fans back the hammer and fires::

ShadowBlade54644: ::hit::

This line of attacking would signify that an attack had been registered to an opponent's face with the system that the Gaming Chat RPer's initially used.

Likewise a dodge would go something like this:

ShadowBlade54644:  ::Draws his revolver from it's right hip holster::

ShadowBlade54644: ::Aims at opponent's face, fans back the hammer and fires::

Opponent:  ::dodge::

ShadowBlade54633:::hit::

So, combat went in the order that got posted in the chat room.  I'll never be sure if everyone was seeing the same thing, but I never heard any outcries to the contrary.

Just by watching what was going on for a short period, I picked up the style immediately, and I don't think that any of them saw me coming when I entered the room.  You had to lead off any AIM RP with an entrance to declare yourself as being in character.  Some of them got pretty elaborate.

ShadowBlade54644:  ::Enters the bar::

I'm not sure if Gaming Chat was always a bar, but after I joined the fray, it was from that point forward.  Setting is always key.

I knew from the moment that I saw them that I'd enter, but there needed to be motivation.  I'd just seen From Dusk Till Dawn for first time in a while, so I decided to go with the "I hate vampires approach.  The RPers in Gaming Chat on that fateful day were being very clear about being Vampires.

I know for sure that among the first I saw were Deedlit Watchman under her first name, and Darrian Nightshade.  I can't forget Darrian because I picked a fight with him right off the bat.  I don't know how I injected myself, but we brawled for sure.

I don't remember how it went anymore.  I know he shot me in the hand because he didn't aim one of his shots, and I called where it hit (thus creating the 'aim your attacks first' precedent) but I know for sure that at some point he punched me hard enough for me to fly across the bar.  The fight ended when I smashed him with a wooden chair and used the splintered leg as a stake to plunge into his heart.  Of course someone pulled it out and he laughed at me because his type of Vampire didn't die that way, but that was alright.  Much like in comic books, AIM RP seldom had true death.  Not for characters anyway.

I think after that I logged on to AIM every day for almost a year straight.  With a almost a constant presence in Gaming Chat, the community quickly began to grow.  Strangers would join out of the blue and eventually there must have been over a hundred of us, all across the USA, maybe across the planet.  I won't go into all of that yet though.  This as a beginning.  I strongly doubt that anyone will ever read it honestly.

I just wanted to begin with documenting as absolutely as I can, how it started.  There were certainly people there before me, but I've always felt like I helped put Gaming Chat and AIM RP on the map so to speak.  I'd honestly love for any of the other RPers from that time to come here and dispute me because I just would love to talk to any of them at this point.  It's been over a decade.

It's bothering me just a little bit that Times New Roman isn't a font for Tumblr.  I think that AIM relied on that one.

As I search through the internet I find nothing about AIM RP.  In the heyday there were several Geocities sites, some of which hosted profiles and guestbooks.  I find now that some of them are archived, but wouldn't know where to look for some of the ones by people who came after I did to Gaming Chat.

On this Tumblr, I will post links to any Gaming Chat related archives that I can find,  progress on locating the "Old Heads" of AIM RP and continue to tell my long winded story of one of the strangest periods of my life.