Day 4

   As time went on and computers hit the amazing speeds of 500 Ghz I began to get into various chats around the internet (Dial up as there was no broad band yet). The very first graphical chat world I was involved with was called "The Palace". It was really cool becouse your avatar was actually a graphic you could use to interact with others with. The Palace had many rooms and places like the library or lounge and places like beaches and stuff. You could walk your little avatar around (smiley faces or uploaded photos) to the various places. One neat place was the bedroom and you and another avatar could enjoy bouncing on a bed together, lol! You could even make what was called a bus and get others to jump on it and travel together to other places as a group.

   The Palace got old pretty soon and I moved on to AOL Chat. At the time you were charged by the hour you spent on AOL and at one time I ran up a $600.00 online bill. I never paid them as a lot of people did not as well and AOL finally created the one month payment system and wiped every ones slate clean (thank god).

   I made a new friend at a bike shop I was working at and he was into computers. He asked if I had heard of the game "DOOM". I had and he helped me get it set up on my computer so that we could network together and play over his network. It took a few days to get it all worked out but finally we were slaughtering our way through endless bloody corridors.

   So DOOM was my "First Online Game Experience".