[oflannabhra]

The Descent series was my gateway to the Internet, and really paralleled my coming of age.

I played D1 dialing up my friends when I was 10, which was amazing. I swapped numbers with some folks on the local BBS and played 1-on-1 deathmatches. My brother installed DEVIL, and I learned how to launch things from DOS, interact with a CLI and filesystem, and of course make my own levels.

We got Internet service and then D2 multiplayer, facilitated by Kali/Kahn for match-making completely blew my mind. I think I was 12 or 13, and discovering things like IRC and webpages describing advanced techniques like chording were hugely eye-opening for how big the world was. Making friends on ICQ, and discovering warez was like living in a sci-if novel. I also got into building and upgrading PCs to be able to play at higher resolutions and frame rates.

Descent 3 was a huge step forward graphically, and brought about sniping with the mass driver. It had worldwide rankings, and making the top 100 leaderboard as a 16 year old still ranks as one of my most mind-blowing moments. It was the first time I had high speed internet, and really ushered in the modern era of gaming for me.

Thank you for this. I’ve since moved on in my life (obviously), but it is amazing to have spent some moments today reflecting on all this. I doubt I would be a child of the internet or a software engineer today without Descent.