Meanwhile, 2nd and 3rd edition D&D games gave us the esoteric THAC0, spell sequencers, and killing a red dragon with a monk’s Quivering Palm. The Butcher haunted us with his yells of “FRESH MEAT!” and I learned how to dupe spellbooks with clicking in the right spot. Another Blizzard game, Diablo, opened the world of action RPGs, balanced by the D&D classic Baldur’s Gate (with it’s tomb of a manual). The Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss were our companions and enemies for an engrossing summer. I realized years later: a 30-minute survive mission wasn’t supposed to take all afternoon. We’d take turns playing Starcraft and hoping it would work on this reboot of the finicky, old 486 and taking breaks by the pool to pour over the lore in the manual (and remember those?). My fondest memories of computer gaming are from childhood summers with my brother and an empty house. Thinking back, some of my memories are more hazy than I would like, but I’ll blame all the different computers, hardware, distros, and constant trying of new things, rather than age. This is my journey to a Linux only life, while still gaming. The blending of those worlds is often like oil and water, but with the magic of open-source and indie game developers I’ve been living in the best of both worlds. Other times you work hard: software RAID and fiery, wobbly windows, Gentoo, full disk encryption… but you love the work of tinkering and a love of Linux is born. Sometimes you get lucky: the right games at the right time and a lifelong hobby is born. I had never seen an RPG before or known anything about Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), but clearly the kid at the local game store knew exactly what to recommend to my mom for a kid like me. On a birthday around that year I eagerly ripped into the wrapping of a present to reveal… Baldur’s Gate. I knew nothing except that the Starcraft box (remember those?) looked the coolest and that’s what we got. I was a young teenager in the late 90s, browsing the aisles of the local Babbage’s (before it became GameStop), having somehow convinced my dad, not a lover of games, that we needed something to test the new CD-ROM drive.
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