· 3 min read
On Nostalgia
A MechWarrior gaming community I joined at 13 is the reason I became a software engineer. I recently reconnected with someone from that world, 26 years later.
On Nostalgia
Published: · 3 min read
A MechWarrior gaming community I joined at 13 is the reason I became a software engineer. I recently reconnected with someone from that world, 26 years later.
I recently started chatting to a guy I knew 26 years ago. We were both part of the same online gaming community. I was 13.
The game was MechWarrior. The community around it was huge, and a lot of it lived on mektek.net. Forums, mods, custom content. It was a proper scene.
I got hooked. Played constantly. Made friends with people I never met in person but spoke to every day. That was normal for us, long before Discord existed. We had TeamSpeak, IRC, and forum threads that went on for pages.
By 15, I was helping run public dev chats on IRC with the developers of the game. Microsoft employees, turning up to talk to the community about what they were building. Outside of those sessions, we’d chat on MSN Messenger (RIP). Having the devs of your favourite game on your contacts list, actually talking to you about the game you loved, was something else. That kind of access felt impossible and completely normal at the same time.
The part that matters
I’m not a game engineer. I never built anything inside MechWarrior itself. But I wanted to build around it. Community websites. Stats pages. Forums with custom themes. That was the goal.
So I opened Microsoft FrontPage and started dragging things around. Tables inside tables. Inline styles before I knew what CSS was. Animated GIFs. Hit counters. The full early-2000s experience.
That was my first website. Built for a MechWarrior community, using FrontPage, on a free hosting provider with a subdomain I thought was the coolest thing in the world.
It was terrible. But it worked, and I’d made it. That feeling of publishing something to the internet and having other people actually use it was enough. I wanted more of it.
From FrontPage I moved to Dreamweaver. From Dreamweaver to writing HTML by hand. Then PHP. Then everything else that followed over the next two decades.
Full circle
Twenty-six years later, I build software for a living. I run a consultancy. I’ve worked on projects across every kind of stack and industry. All of it traces back to wanting to make a website for a gaming community.
I wouldn’t have guessed that at 13. I didn’t sit down with a career plan. I sat down with a copy of MechWarrior and a group of people online who were into the same thing. The web stuff came because I wanted to contribute something to that community.
Gaming gets a bad reputation sometimes. Time wasted, nothing productive, all the usual lines. For me it was the opposite. It gave me a community, a reason to learn, and a career.
I owe a lot to that game. Good to be reminded of it.
