... notable events : Rats? or perhaps the computer mouse making holes in our walls

Castle Wolvenstein, DOOM, Descent... this was the time of the initial explosion of 3-D first person shooters. What could we do? We were mere university students. Resistance was futile.

I remember playing Castle Wolvenstein back in the late 80s, early 90s so imagine my thrill when DOOM came out. It was an event rapturous enough to drive the likes of us catatonic in our excitement. DOOM was light years better in graphics, sound effects and game play compared to the already ground breaking Castle Wolvenstein.

Promptly deleting space from the harddrive of my awesome kick-ass i386 1.5Mb RAM personal computing machine bought from Future Shop in downtown Vancouver, and lovingly carried home in an overly priced taxi driven by a chatty pakistani with lots of head swaying to accompany his accented english, I installed DOOM with great anticipation and fanfare. The world we discovered within the confines of the computer screen was breathtaking. With surround sound speakers, playing in the middle of the night, nudging your computer self along with your keyboard in the eerie glow of the monitor, the experience was so real you jumped in fright every time one of those brown imps with fireballs jumped out at you from around the corridor, or a darn pink pig-monster rushed out of the dark at you with gnashing teeth.

Computer games were the mainstay of campus residence life, the life blood of our community, and the bane of our existence. Long before DOOM, back when I was still a first year student at a dormitory type residence, we had discovered the wonderful world of networked computers! A short walk from our residence was the Macintosh computer lab, open to all students to use. This was a time when personal computers weren't exactly very personal as yet. There were still more students without their own computers than there were students with one.

The game we played at the Macintosh lab was a simple tank programming game. One would write simple programming commands from a fixed set of available commands for your tank to follow. You then, sitting back to watch, set your tank loose into the virtual arena against other tanks to do battle, pitting your programming against the others to see who had written the best and most robust programme to win. It was a simple game but yet the very novelty of actually playing against another player was..... uhhhhh.... yes....mmm.... addictive doesn't even cover it.

We spent days and nights working on our tank's programming, tweaking it, adjusting it, re-coding it to anticipate the changes also being made by the guys to their tanks at the next computer terminal. Over and over we would pit our tanks and then go back to the drawing board and tweak it yet again. I started naming my tanks with each increasingly elaborate revision, the first was called "Tune", the next "Song", going up to "Concerto" and my final masterpiece which I must proudly say, pretty much trashed everyone else's tank, was called "Symphony". My good buddy Steve ran through the Macintosh lab after classes on two consecutive days and found us still busily tapping away at the keyboards, having not left the lab except on emergencies to eat and for toilet breaks. This was what set the scene for DOOM and the next big thing to hit us with the true 3-D engine, Descent.

During the summer was when we really went wild. Most of us stayed on at Fairview Residence which were the university's summer residences as most of us didn't go back home for summer. With hardly anything else to do, except for a few summer classes or make up lessons, the monsters of DOOM ran riot through our rooms.

Steve moved into an apartment with a few other guys, and armed with their latest i486s, their walls vibrated to the haunting tunes, hellish screams and unearthly sounds of a nightly full scale battle royal. Running cables through tiny round holes in their walls which they swear were made by rats, they linked up their computers into one big virtual world.

As for me, my poor i386 was simply too slow and too obsolete. As the games got progressively more elaborate, my little computer couldn't keep up, and besides, I was in an apartment across the courtyard from Steve and the guys. Instead, while the daylight hours would find me spending time with my girlfriend, by night I would be over at Steve's room to take over his computer while he slept between games. Immersing myself into the gore-splatted corridors of DOOM I would run around with my chainsaw in some of the most insane 4 way deathmatches and frag-nights. The guys would create their own maps and challenge each other over and over, racking up kills or frags as they were called, as they go. DOOM was our world. We would get so involved with the game that the eerie music and monster sounds emanating from the surround sound speakers in the dead of the night would sometimes scare us so badly that we would need to log off, turn on the lights to take a look around the now silent room for a reality check, heart beat racing, completely spooked.

We weren't complete geeks however, we played ice-hockey in winter and ball-hockey in summer, we cycled through the university's endowment lands, went camping, chased pretty co-eds, watched movies, partied hard (just minus the beer for me), joined in the Engineering pranks that my university's Engineers were infamous for, and generally had a great time but none topped the computer as out main waste of time. Whatever activity we did in the day, the nights were the sole domain of DOOM and its denizens.

However, insufficient sleep and a lot of missed 8:30am classes soon took its toll on us. Grades suffered. Going into 3rd and 4th year, the credit courses became increasingly critical. No longer would we have the luxury of summer make-up classes as we were running out of summers. No one wanted to do a 5th year. I even started getting a recurring dream of impending exams. In my dream, it would be the end of the semester with exams around the corner and I would be endlessly searching the corridors trying to find my class in a last minute attempt to at least attend the final few classes having not attending any yet, panicking with each passing moment as it dawned on me that I didn't even have an idea where my classes were. So persistent was this dream that years later, long after I had graduated this dream could still wake me up in the middle of the night in cold sweat to ask myself, "I graduated... right?", and fall back to sleep in great relief when the answer thankfully came back... "yes".

We never really stopped playing our computer games, but we did stopped being so crazy about it. Steve and the guys yanked out the cables, giving the holes in their walls back to the rats that made them to focus on studies and graduation. The monsters, imps and pig-demons of our nights were put on hold till we were safely past the finish line, degrees in hand, mortarboards on our heads.

We grew up somewhat I suppose, because graduate we did, much to our own relief. I left for home after graduation, returning to Singapore to start the next phase of my life, but I understand that the guys still in Canada, now fully-fledged working adults and productive members of society, restarted their games, rejoining the monsters in that unending struggle for supremacy.