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.
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::
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.
I have a couple of leads, but nothing concrete. Either way, it'll be here, for the whole internet to read.
