there are a lot of quotes about rose colored glasses to choose from - especially when it comes to gaming.

i’ve made a lot of failed attempts to show my wife the games i loved as a kid. fighting the camera. wrestling with the controls. 15 frames per second. it never lands the way i want it to.

but sometimes the game is exactly as you remember it. everything feels right. you’re the problem.

in december 2000, like i always did, i picked up an issue of pc gamer. in what amounted to a throwaway blurb to fill out a page was this:

at the time i was playing counter-strike 1.0, the firearms mod, diablo 2, unreal tournament. all of that stopped. i was completely hooked until vanilla wow came out in 2004.

i played infantry every single day - twin peaks, heinrich’s point, kliests ridge, eol. i was a pub player, 99% of the time. there were a few regulars i’d end up playing with, and i’d join them in an ovd (organized offense vs defense) here and there, but mostly i’d just log in and drop into whichever of the dozens of public twin peaks ctf arenas had room. there were always dozens.

the good news is the game is still alive. after sony shut it down, the community kept it running as free infantry, and it’s still there today.

so here’s where the rose colored glasses come in - it’s not the game that’s different.

the community is much smaller than it was in 2000-2004, and everyone who’s left is a hardened vet. people don’t make mistakes. sure, i may have played for 10 years or so spread between sony and free infantry, but that’s nothing compared to what the game looks like now. what’s left is hardcore organized matches. there’s no room for someone like me trying to relive some sloppy pub play.

which got me thinking. the server stack is open source. so why not just build bots that play like real players?

i don’t know yet if that’s a weekend project or a two year one (i’d guess closer to the second). more on that in the next post.