For this week’s Retro Fri-Dave I thought that instead of reliving the old days of gaming, I would write you a poem.

'Twas the night before Fri-Dave, when all through the mall
Everybody was shopping, balls to the wall.

The gift cards were sold by the millions this year,
In the hope that huge profits soon would appear.
The children were nestled with NDS in hand,
While visions of Zelda danced cross the land.

This week I am going to tell all you boys and girls a Christmas story that took place long ago.  This story is from a time of disco balls, bell bottom pants, and kitchen appliances colored in Harvest Gold.  It was the early 1980’s and FarmerDave had just graduated from the University of Madison, Wisconsin with a degree in Agriculture.  Having just earned my sheepskin, I headed home with the thoughts of telling my parents, who had been farming for 20 years by then, just how to run a farm.

Well, I had graduated at the end of summer and I was looking to relax for a while at the farm working and earning a little cash until Christmas, at which time I would decide what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I had heard about a sequel to the original Atari 2600 called the Atari 5200 Super System and I was very excited about it.  I went to the local five and dime store and actually played on one of the game consoles.  After playing a few games of Dig Dug I was hooked; I thought to myself “I have to get one of these for Christmas!"

Last night, as I was thinking up topics for this week’s article, I began to reminisce about some of the first multiplayer network games I ever played.   I think my first was Doom.  Doom, as many of you know, was the most popular first person shooter to come out in the mid 1990’s, and a game that helped to define the genre.  The gameplay was simple and straight forward: kill everything in sight.

When Doom was released, I was working for a major utility company.  When lunch time would come around, we would all grab a sandwich and head down to the locked IT area.  We would sit in front of a workstation that we were “burning in” and set it up as the server.  We then would fire up Doom, connect to the server, and spend the remainder of our lunch hour shooting demonic creatures.  We did this while watching the door, just in case the boss came by.  Because of our activities and the activities of thousands more like us, companies would eventually create policies about game playing because games like Doom use broadcast packets that could bring a network to its knees.

This week as I sat down to write this article, I was angry.  Well, maybe not angry, but definitely frustrated.  You see before I sat down to write, I decided to play one of my favorite first person shooters, Battlefield: Vietnam, to unwind and get in the gaming mood.  I haven’t played much lately, and I was looking forward to a little head to head competition.  To make a long story short, I was horrible.  I would spawn, turn, and I was dead.  I catch a glimpse of someone, get in a crouched position, and – BANG - I was dead. 

What does a bad night of multiplayer gaming have to do with Retro Fridave? The answer is in what I did next...