The Philosophy of a Romanian Gamer Part III: StrikeCraft

[Adrian is a Romanian writer currently living in Galati. In this series of articles he'll be giving us an insight into just how different gaming is in Romania. A country that didn't see any form of video game until after their 1989 revolution against the ruling Communist regime. Part I, II]

Another phenomenon took place in the mid 90s in Romania. Something that made the Terminator obsolete. I am talking of course about the computer games revolution, most of us couldn’t afford to own a computer, but society managed to find a solution. If you were a gamer and wanted to play computer games, you could easily go to an Internet Cafe. The Internet Cafes were large rooms which had computers connected to the internet through a local network. Children could play multiplayer computer games for a small amount of money per hour.

I spent most of the time in those kinds of places. My friends and I (I had two friends) were saving the pocket money that we were receiving during the week to spend eight hours in Internet Cafes during the weekend. We were playing StarCraft and Quake II!

I was a lousy StarCraft player. To me, StarCraft was something I couldn’t possibly understand. Compared to the Terminator games, this was too much! A whole different universe. Bogdan, one of my two friends, was a good player. He was teaching me how to play StarCraft and I was eager to learn. So Bogdan became my StarCraft mentor while Sorin (the other friend) became my Quake II tutor. I was happy with the education I was receiving from them and I knew that one day I would be able to defeat them.

The two games opened new philosophical perspectives. I have to say that at that time I was reading a lot of science fiction books, so the games were books which gave me the ability to have an active role. Which was great! Much more interesting than reading.

As cheap as the Internet Cafes were, an avid gamer always wanted more. So the cafes came up with an interesting offer. The owners realized that during night time, the number of the clients would be drastically reduced because the children weren’t allowed to exit their home during the night, which was a reasonable thing. So the owners invented an offer that would make the children disobey their parents and spend their nights in Internet Cafes. If you would buy eight hours during the night time, you would receive a 50% discount. The offer was called ‘œLong Night’ and from that moment on most of my nights were long.

It was hard to keep up with the new games that entered the market. I was becoming a reasonably good Quake II player, when Counter Strike revolutionized the whole thing. I remember that no team wanted me when we were playing without the friendly fire option toggled. I couldn’t blame them (nobody could!). This one time, one of the members of my team threw a flash bomb and yelled to me: ‘œTurn around!’. I knew that if I wouldn’t turn around, I would be blinded. So I turned around and closed my eyes. Literally. I remained in that position until everyone started to laugh and when I opened my eyes I saw that they were laughing at me. My screen was white and someone was shooting at me. I died.

Nobody was laughing when I was playing StarCraft, I was about to become one of the best StarCraft players pretty soon. My parents saw my interest in computers and thought that I could maybe someday become a programmer. So they were searching for a way of buying a computer. Of course, when I found out, I was thrilled! The prospect of being able to play without paying was a utopia! The question was: what kind of computer could we possibly afford?