Sam, is confabulation a real word?
Is it possible to have a reunion of people who never really met? Is it possible to mourn a meeting ground that never really existed in the first place?
The Internet is a weird place, and I have so many weird periods of āI remember back whenā¦ā and so many weird lives that are long gone. Itās weird, but I did so many things and met so many people in my time, but canāt shake the feeling that I was so often in the Wrong Place at the Right Time or the Right Place at the Wrong Time. I havenāt seemed to contribute anything lasting yet, at least not enough to allow me to pass very many of Wikipediaās notability tests just yet.
One of the places āI spent my youthā was the SCRAMM forum. (Pretty much everyone on that forum was just a kid.) A brief history, as best I can remember it: Jimmi āSergeā ThĆĀøgersen (Denmark) planned to build a new, freeware compiler for LucasArtsā SCUMM engine. Serge decided that there wasnāt an easy single version of the SCUMM engine to target (after having done much SCUMM reverse engineering, which eventually went into SCUMM Revisited, which eventually helped the ScummVM team). After some retooling, SCRAMM development changed hands to James āRethgualsā (Slaughter backwards) Slaughter (UK). I, Max āWorldMakerā Battcher (Kentucky), was introduced to SCRAMM somewhere around this point through a group planning a game for SCRAMM known as Unidentified Flying Entertainment (UFE). UFE split up shortly after.
I was young, I was naive. I defended a project that did eventually fizzle out in vaporware like so many internet-announced projects. Just like SCRAMM turned out to be vaporware, so did, unsurprisingly, my own projects. I dreamed big, and I failed to follow through. I havenāt accomplished so many of the things I set out to doā¦ On the other hand, since then I have completed high school, am a good bit of the way through a Masterās Degree in Engineering, and have interned at Microsoft, so I guess I canāt say that Iāve done too poorlyā¦ Iām just not a millionaire yet, and Iāve yet to be actually paid in the realm of computer games, as I had hoped.
Dierdra Kiai (Canada), once known as Squinky, actually completed two of her planned games and even this summer interned with Telltale Games. Sheās got renaissance talent, though, and can draw, create music, and write weird stories. (I can just do one of the three.) In researching this post (verifying her nickname of the time) I even found that Deirdra had written a similar post to this one a year ago (here), thus forcing me to rewrite this a bit from my original plan.
She started her post from the same place I nearly started mineā¦ Neil āTrapezoidā Cicierega (Massachusetts), has become that weird type of celebrity that only the internet can produce. Heās a big enough celebrity to get a fairly detailed Wikipedia page. He was one of the inspirations for, and one of the distributors of the Yatta! fad. He would currently be best known amongst my friends for his work as the lyricist (under the psuedonym Lemon Demon) for the Ultimate Showdown. I donāt even have to link those, because they are just a quick search away, or you can get the same information from the Wikipedia page.
Hereās a couple of other SCRAMM forum alums that I know something of and that Deirdra missed:
Neole Egen (India), last I heard was developing some Indian websites. I couldnāt remember where to go searching for them, though. His 2dAdventure.com website is still up, if somewhat bare. It still has a copy of my old Abstarcia page, even. Iāll save myself the embarassment of direct linking it, because Iām sure the curious can find it or search it.
Andrew ātelariumā Langley (currently of Texas) appears to be doing some pretty big web design work.