I’ve been in Mobile, Alabama the last few days with my friends and family, watching movies, preparing and planning for my upcoming travels, and so on and so forth. While thumbing through older software, that is, somewhere between the realms of Police Quest and Grim Fandango and Phantasmagoria CDs, Ryan and I re-discovered Blizzard’s classic Diablo, second perhaps only to Nethack. I’m not much for computer games, but hey, I’m on vacation. The experience flooded me with memories from my youth.

You see, somewhere buried deep in the closet of my bedroom is a pirated copy of Diablo. The original. The best. No, I didn’t get it off of USENET, or the Internet, or even a BBS. Most of you probably don’t even know what a BBS is anyway, which, oddly enough, makes me feel rather old, despite the fact that I’m only twenty something. Like The Wizard of Oz, my personal burned CD came from the land we now know as Kansas. Or something like that anyway.

The story begins sometime when I was in between middle school and high school, before my days at the Alabama School of Math and Science. The year was 1997. I was heavily into MUDs. We’re talking weekends at a time looking at an ASCII text screen through telnet, while all my friends were playing the latest glitzy expansion pack for Doom. You’ve been eaten by a grue. You can’t go north; you don’t have the key. That sort of thing. My first MUD was DragonMUD, and I still visit it in a very oscillatory way from time to time. In MUD time, I am, as of today, eight years and eight months old.

I made a lot of good friends online. I didn’t know them personally, or know their names, but it felt like I knew them just the same. In particular, there was this guy who called himself TheWizard, from where else but Kansas. And from where else but Kansas did a package arrive at my door just weeks after the release of Diablo. It was a burned CD. The case cover said:

See you on BattleNet. — TheWizard

I wonder what he’s been up to all these years. Rest in peace, CyberLodge MUSH.