The past few days I've been finding that the Unreal community and its subcommunities such as the INF and Serpentine communities aren't completely dead, and this kind of overjoys me.

This game was the epitome of my childhood into my high school years, and I'm going to reminisce and tell you why. Some of you might remember me, or some of my other monikers... Gunslinger, Apollo, but SSJ4Goku was my constant. No, I was not the original. After being part of the INF community I was told that someone in DH went by this name originally, only about 3 years after I was using it. My bad, I suppose.

My father purchased this game in 1999, and I was 7 years old. I would sit in his computer/gaming room and watch him, and because I was mature enough he allowed me to play. The single-player, while good, was not what drew me in; it was the idea of multiplayer and playing against other people all over the world.

So we began playing, tormenting players by being opposite teams and camping in the same spot while protecting the other. The jolt.co.uk servers were not safe, especially the DMDeck17 server, which was undeniably my favorite map. I shortly started running with some people who were notorious for trolling, such as SmartBall and a few of his friends, and learned to get the Nali skin and mass suicide with others to crash servers. Fun and immature times were a plenty.

However, being a young and impressionable 8/9 year old, I got addicted to the stimulation and constant communication that playing online provided. I left the jolt.co.uk scene, and eventually lost interest in the game in it's entirety until 2002. I turned 10, and while cleaning my room I found my father's copy of Unreal Gold and got his permission to play. I noticed that the jolt.co.uk servers were not up or very populated, and I attempted to find somewhere different to play. hLk server, Dark City servers, Sniper Servers... None of them hit the sweet spot, and I was tired of the vanilla game because I was just as good as I was before I stopped playing.

Then I found this one server: SOBServers - Infiltration. I remember double-clicking and spending almost 90 mins waiting at around 12 AM for all the maps and textures and the mod to download, and I joined not knowing anything. I wasn't used to friendly fire, I wasn't used to these new guns that required reloading, I didn't know the button prompts to change firing settings or reload before the end of a clip, I didn't know anything about the maps or the mod itself. I was challenged again.

And so that addiction took hold of me again, and I would play on the server as long as I could so I could download maps to my cache so that I wouldn't come in after 3 rounds of game-time. I started making a few friends... Ambie, Scope (who made the first INF clan I was in, ARMY), Dust, Hades, jus10, Madness, Myth, spiderman. As I got better, I wanted to be in those other clans, and they wanted me. I was in AoZ, GOD (Dust & Hades' brainchild), marvel (very briefly), maybe EC as well. I turned about 12, and I left again.

Then life took over, and other games. I played a lot of Soldier of Fortune 2 (which I hacked in just because), and then began playing with my father's coworker in CS 1.6 and re-challenged myself over again with a completely different game. Almost got to CAL as well, but everyone was too busy to fully commit. Eventually my friends in 1.6 gravitated to Source and my computer could handle it, but not as well as I wanted it to. Being a 14-15 yr old I couldn't find many ways to get money and if I did it wasn't enough to do what I wanted and also upgrade my computer.

When I turned 15, I was involved in my freshman year to an extent, had some friends, had a girlfriend. However, once summer hit, I had an abundance of free time, and began playing again. The community died a bit from 2004-2007, but it still thrived a bit. SA was a big deal, along with C and OHM and others here and there. Some folks remembered me from the past, some didn't. Those who did got me more involved in the community; using teamspeak and RW to voice chat over game like I did in CS. Madness, Mylife, Ham, Lithium, CaveMan, Nite-Owl, and others were really cool with me. I dominated, I pissed people off because I wasn't the nice kid that I used to be (except when I got drunk and tried patching the feud up between C and SA), and I joined C because they seemed to be the best and pissed everyone off.

When school started back up, I got a little less available. Started chillin with stoners, experimenting with stuff, getting with different girls... A computer game I spent 8 years on took a back seat, along with my growing interest in music. I'd play stoned as hell, own decently, and get accused of aimbotting and whatnot by people like pafi and the random scrubs that were playing... It was fun but it got old. Not only was my high getting killed by false accusations, it put pressure on me in the game. I wanted to do better and prove people wrong, that someone with dedication and heart and time could be great without having to be a botter. After a game in December of 2007, I disappeared. Partly because of moving to console, partly because of disinterest.

Throughout the years I popped the game in. Looking at the servers and lack of people upsets me. Looking at the fact that inf servers that are populated are just deathmatch, upsets me. I do keep in touch with a few people here and there, but I miss the old days, and I wish I could remember them more than I do, because those were the best times of multiplayer gaming I will ever experience. The idea of community in a smaller game being so tight-knit, the drama, the accusations, the rivalries, all of it. I miss it so hard, and the sad part is there's nothing to really come back to.

I hope one of these days this community will prop up, ever so slightly. I would come back in a heartbeat. Peace and love to all of you who read this, and much more to those who are still trying to keep INF alive.

Jake

Welcome aboard.

Darkelarious of 333networks also runs INF games.
Unfortunately people running the mutator rather than game-mode are not obvious in the Ubrowser.
This is the same problem for Chaos.
People tend to favour the mutators so they can mix weapons and modes.

Hopefully this is something the 333master browser can solve, once the filter/search facility is in.

Gizzys CSWeapons pack is really hitting the spot for me, and the INF weapons are somewhat less desirable.

Ya I think making InfCD closed source and obfuscated like I did, was a mistake then - and then either I deleted the source when I was done with Unreal1, or lost it in a hard drive crash.

In a way though, kind of nice to know it was liked that well, haha my first real coding project (or rather, an extension of it).


The bot accusations/paranoia really were the death of the community alright, ya - no resolution to it really: either you accept that you don't know if you're playing a straight game, or you get ultra-paranoid about it and all the fun is sucked out of the game, watching for people cheating, and making bad calls about who is/isn't cheating (I should have stayed away from adminning servers really).

The drama though in the Inf community was neverending, and pretty unhealthy/toxic - I'd not stick with a community so long again today, that turned out like that - even though there were plenty of good times playing.


Must be about 10 years now since I stopped playing Unreal1 - don't remember a great deal of it in detail, but was a damn fun game alright

I've been lucky enough to find a couple of other tight-knit communities since then, in UT2004 Onslaught and briefly in TF2, and it's no contest:
No game is as fun, as when you're playing alongside a good tight-knit community; they're hard to find, but worth it when you do find them.

C because they seemed to be the best and pissed everyone off. yep datz us, C wuz da beast ppl luv 2 h8 

Cow wrote on Sep 2^nd, 2014 at 10:04am:


So funny to log back in -- what, 15 years later? -- and see some familiar names around.  If you ever see this, I hope all has been well for you Cow!

After a long time away, i got the random urge come back and see how the old game was doing. This is where gaming began for me and I really loved this game.

I might still have Serpents contact information. I will try and reach out to him. Everyone else I kind of lost when MSN messanger went away.