Alert! Grumpy grandpa approaching!

I've been quite lazy today and as such haven't given myself time to really think what to write about this evening. I did catch myself reminiscing about my early days in EVE though, so why the hell not write about that, or at least what I can remember anyway. It's going to be a pretty nice nostalgic trip for me and will maybe give some of you a slight insight into what life was like back then, and how my life in EVE has been up until now.

I started this game in 2004, at least the first time, by buying a retail copy off the shelf, the main reason being that it was the first big game actually made by an Icelandic (my home) company and I wanted to try it out. I think I even still have the jewel case laying around here somewhere, but after about 5 minutes of searching concluded that it's probably buried below tons of old junk and I'm too lazy to find it. Here's how the case art looks like:

Front of jewel case. Image from eve-tribune.com

Back of jewel case. Wooo Megathron! Image from eve-tribune.com

So, in the disc went and I was off to my first EVE adventure!

Believe it or not, Derelus is the first character I ever created for EVE. He didn't look quite the same as he does now though, since the characters looked quite different back then. I'd show you the old portrait if I still had it, and a whole 5 minutes (again) of searching the internet delivered no results. It was quite green though, and he looked pretty badass.

These very earliest of days are pretty blurry in memory, but I do remember the tutorial being pretty lackluster, just basically saying "Here's a noobship, here's a civilian gun and a miner. GO!" (ok that's an exaggeration, but it was before the time of the so-called "new-player experience" thing). I don't believe though, that learning the game back then was much more difficult than it is today, simply for the reason that the game was much less complex (although still no walk in the park). Missiles did full damage to any target, fast or slow, big or small. There was no turret tracking, no mining crystals, a lot fewer modules to choose from, and the biggest, baddest, meanest ship you could get your hands on was a battleship. It was a very different game back then.

OSOM GRAFICKS YO!

After reading the tutorial I undocked my glorious noobship and beheld the wonders of space. The graphics were of course much different as well, though looking extremely snappy for its time. I do remember one very kind soul sitting outside the beginner station though, who convoed me and asked me if I was a new player or an alt. I of course said I was a new player, and he immediately transferred, I believe it was ONE MILLION ISK to my account. Now, back then, a million isk was a lot more than it is today, and I of course was ecstatic, seeing as I began with a measly 5.000isk to my name. I never met the guy again, pity.

After a few days lulling about, mining, shooting rats, probably dying a few times, I ran into an advertisement jetcan (jetcans didn't disappear until after the daily downtime) telling me of a corp called Zeon Incorporated. Intrigued, I located their office nearby, applied to join and was accepted. Pretty much focused on mining and industry, we usually mined the day away, chatting casually with each other with no care in the world. There were no mining barges back then, and the holy grail of mining was the Mining Apocalypse with its 8 turret slots and decent cargo hold. Most miners made do with a Miner Thorax though, since battleships were pretty expensive (About 100mil, but back then that was a lot of money)

I recall both when I finally got into my awesome Merlin frigate, feeling pretty much invincible, and also my first ever cruiser. It was a Moa. Ahh, good memories. I later lost it in a nullsec war. A sad day.

Ah, the Moa. What an ugly ship. Kind of looks like a chicken with a briefcase, doesn't it?

Pretty soon-ish after I joined, us members were told that our little friendly mining corp would be merged into a bigger, more pvp-focused corp called Quam Singulari. I didn't know it at the time of course, but Quam were to become pretty big players in the EVE universe for a time, and are still mucking about even to this day! I still keep some ties to my old Quam buddies who still play, though these "ties" mostly consist of idling in their public channel, exchanging the odd hello.

And with Quam came my first venture into pvp and nullsec. Back then, there was no in-game mechanic for alliances. Alliances were pretty much just corps that had good standings to each other, and keeping track of the "alliance" member corps would often prove quite difficult. I remember the time I first joined a nullsec fleet. Some corp had gotten its standings messed up, or forgotten to add Quam as blue, and immediately as I jumped into the system where the fleet was staging on the gate, I was attacked by these unknowing corp members. The situation was resolved quickly enough though, before I was destroyed, but that was my first player vs. player combat experience. Friendly fire. Awesome!

The QUAM Singulari logo, unchanged since the beginning.

What follows is pretty blurry in my memory, as I believe it was mostly just nullsec patrolling and things like that. I think I took my first break around this time, though I can't remember how long it was. I don't really have a recollection of my doings until 2006, when I first left Quam to join my real-life friend in some industry-related activities, which I won't go into as it's way too boring. That was, however, about the time where I got another account and created Jackus Loftus.

When my real-life friend stopped playing, I decided to go try some lowsec piracy. I believe I frequented around the system Kheram, terrorizing miners and mission runners alike. Eventually, I met a fellow pirate named Shazina Sin who was also frequenting this area, and after I had heard talk in the nearby trade hub system that the locals were going to form a fleet to hunt us down, convinced him to join me in fighting off the locals. I don't quite remember how, or even if a big fight went down, but after that we terrorized the region as friends and eventually formed a small pirate corp together, 5CUM.

While pirating our lives away, we started to notice that many of our kills were on members of the same, small corp, Sanctus Templum. They also started putting bounties on us, and seemed generally very pissed off. Both me and my good pirate friend of course devised the brilliant and hilarious idea to infiltrate the corp with my new alt, Jackus Loftus, climb the ranks and eventually rob them blind. We were pirates after all! So the plan was set in motion, and Jackus joined them.

Exactly what we looked like pirating lowsec. Yarr.

It took almost 3 months to get to basically the top of the corporate ladder, where I was in a position to rob them. However, in these 3 months, I had come to know a lot of the members, and had actually helped in building up the corp to a pretty decent one. My pirate buddy, who had himself placed an alt of his own in the corp, agreed with me, so we proposed a compromise. The half-assed, pirates-with-a-conscience that we were, decided to rob only half of what the corp had (which, in hindsight, was a pretty funny thing to do), and reveal ourselves to be the same pirates that had been terrorizing them for months. Come to think of it, I recall even staging a fight where Jackus destroyed a badly-fit frigate flown by Derelus to gain trust with the corp. Now THAT is hilarious dedication! The CEO and members were of course speechless when the reveal came, but I seem to recall them taking it pretty well, seeing as we'd only rob half of them. Ha! The corp fell apart shortly after though, I believe, since Jackus was pretty much running things by then.

After this ordeal I joined back up with Quam, stayed with them for a bit and then took another break from EVE, lasting until 2008. When I came back, I joined my old pirate buddy from Kheram again in his hisec war-deccing corp and played around with hisec wars a bit. Then I tried FW for a few months, got bored with it and took yet another break. Came back in 2010 for a very short stint, stopped playing again, and HERE I AM!

So this has been a basic iteration of my EVE story as best I can recall it, there may be and are probably some things I am remembering incorrectly but it should be fairly accurate. I'm leaving a lot of details out simply for the reason that I can't remember them clearly enough. I hope this has been an interesting read, it certainly ended up being longer than I had planned (But not as long when I read it over. Weird stuff). But oh well, it was fun nostalging all over the place (ew).