Internal Dialogue

[ Continuation from Part I ]

When we left high school, everyone in our group went their separate ways. I personally expected the contact between us to fade, because except for the occasional lan party we had nothing else in common. But this quickly changed.

During our our first lan party in January of 2002, someone introduced us to a game called Counter-Strike. We got so hooked that afterwards, we quickly started to play online. Besides the lan parties we now had something else in common: we played the same game. It didn’t take long for us to start a clan and begin playing Counter-Strike competitively. However, we weren’t that good and decided to put off playing the actual so-called “official” matches on ladders.

Meanwhile, we started seeing each other outside of lan parties. We often went to the movies and/or for a drink. This was more than I expected: to this day I don’t know if – at the time – it was purely Counter-Strike that kept us together, or if the friendships that had formed between us were more important than the game. Sure, we hung out together, but besides playing games we didn’t really ‘do’ much. But I guess most friendships (and especially groups of friends) are like that.

In early 2003 our lives – or at least mine – was transformed once more. I had left my “IRC-life” behind only two years ago, but we met several people while playing on a Dutch Counter-Strike server (Uithof 24/7: for us the place where everything started) that invited us to join QuakeNet. For me IRC felt like yesterday, and I adapted to our new ‘home’ very quickly. Our activity on msn diminished quickly: the #fonzie channel on QuakeNet had become our new home base. Most Fonzies hadn’t been on IRC before, but as far as I can remember everyone quickly adjusted to our ‘new’ way of communicating.

We still weren’t playing 5on5 Counter-Strike matches on official ladders, but Ivan and his brother were playing small 2on2 matches. As for the rest of us, we were having a lot of fun playing on public servers. In 2002 I had already started creating maps for the game, and it seemed some of my maps gained quite a following on the Uithof server. In the summer of 2003 we decided we wanted to create a machinima movie (a film filmed within a game, in our case obviously Counter-Strike). In just three weeks we wrote a script, filmed the scenes, voiced the characters and edited the whole thing. It was great fun: I remember how one entire evening was spent trying to come up with a name for the movie. Eventually one of our core members (Machil) – I’ll explain the core term later on – came up with Pandora’s Box. But before that Ivan and I had a lot of fun thinking of titles with the word ’snitch’ in it. That word was used in a sentence in the movie, and we thought it would be a good idea to mix that word with almost every movie title in existence. I believe Machil was quite irritated, but we hadn’t laughed that hard in years. Near the end we couldn’t even finish pronouncing the next idea without bursting into laughter.

Pandora’s Box was what you call a sleeper hit. At the time, machinima was fairly new and we would have been happy with a few hundred downloads (no streaming video at the time, either: people downloaded without knowing what they got!). Much to our surprise, it was mentioned on various counter-strike sites and became a popular file on FilePlanet. And even better: one of the most well known machinima creators back then approached me on IRC and congratulated me and the guys on a job well done. I was flabbergasted: compared to his work, our movie was basically amateur hour. But there’s no denying that it had certain amusing qualities – most of which were thanks to Machil – which made up for all the bad.

We quickly decided we wanted (and needed) to create a sequel. Work quickly started on a script, and with the help of this famous machinima creator we embarked on what is to date my biggest project to date. I really can’t say that Pandora’s Box II was ‘my’ project, because it was very much a group effort. In our group, there has never really been a leader. We all excelled at something, but I think subconsciously we made sure no one ever took the lead. But if I had to choose someone that acted as the glue – the one that kept the whole thing together – then it would be me. It sounds strange coming from myself, but I know what I’m good at. For Pandora’s Box II was very much the project lead: everyone was equal, but someone had to step up and take control because the project was quickly spiraling out of control. The whole thing became so big it took months and months of preparation.

Machil was in charge of the script, the characters and the voice acting. Ivan was blessed with bringing to life the most technically difficult scene in the entire movie: creating a car chase. For this he spent months building extremely detailed maps. Daniel Frome (the popular machinima creator) took control of the music and gave us valuable tips as we went along. And as previously mentioned, I took control of the entire project. Next to creating maps, I had to create schedules, bring in extras, take care of editing/post-processing, and act as a director during filming. That last bit was extremely difficult and frustrating, I can tell you. Managing up to eight people over the internet while trying to direct four people sitting next to you turned out to be very challenging. Luckily it all turned out okay, and although at certain times frustration ran high, we ended up with a lovely outtakes video.

After filming it was initially thought we’d be able to finish the movie in about two months. Unfortunately, Ivan still had a lot of work to do on the car chase, and the editing process took much longer than I had expected. Everyone was busy working on their respective parts, but emotions started to run high. I’ve actually never talked about this before, but during February and March of 2004 the project was in serious danger of collapsing. Since everyone saw me as the communication hub, and I got to hear all the complaints In march, some people got quite irritated with the slow progress and constantly complained about it to me. Next to that, our producer had another machinima project to manage which was set to be released shortly after ours, and the team behind that project were complaining to me that our movie was getting too much (and theirs to little) attention in the community media. Meanwhile I was still finishing editing, and there was so much attention to detail that it took weeks to create just the trailer. It had to be done over and over again, and each version contained a pushed back release date. I doubt anyone realized it, but at the time I had serious doubts if the thing would ever get finished.

Luckily things eventually came together, and after nine months of hard work the movie was finally released in May of 2004. The community’s reception of the movie was divided: some really enjoyed the more comedic touch that had been given to this movie, but others complained about the bad acting and chaotic story. There was however no question that the final scenes (especially the car chase) were the best of the movie. Luckily for us we’d spend most of our times on these scenes, and I’m glad they were liked. After the release Ivan and I decided we wanted to create another movie; this time a short action-packed movie to showcase our abilities with the new Half-Life 2 engine (Source). We did quite a bit of pre-production, but unfortunately the project never really took off.

While working on Pandora’s Box II, we also worked on several other things. Recently Ivan and I dubbed 2004 Fonzie’s “golden year”. As a clan we started playing official Counter-Strike matches, I created countless scripts/games for our bots on IRC and Ivan kept working on our clan site. And last but not least, Ivan and I created GotRank: an IRC service that provided bots that would idle in people’s channels and tell them their rank on competition ladders for various games. At first I didn’t think there’d be much interest, and it was at that time that I made a bet that, between Fonzie members, will never be forgotten. I bet that the service wouldn’t attract more than 10 or 20 people by the end of the week.

Much to my surprise, the bot service turned out to be very popular, and within months we had a network of 45 bots and serviced over 700 channels. We still regard this as our most successful project to date: although it took a lot of time and (with regard to customer service) patience, we’re very proud of our work and enjoyed the project greatly.

With all of this going on, Fonzie was becoming a pretty well known in the local community. We made friends with countless other clans, created two popular movies, provided bot services throughout QuakeNet, provided Ventrilo (voice chat) services to various ‘allied’ clans, had the one of the best websites around, and were starting to become pretty good at Counter-Strike. We even created a system that automatically recorded all of our wars and added them to our website. Many clans were very jealous and kept asking for our source code. The war team that played official Counter-Strike matches was expanded and we had a lot of new people joining our Counter-Strike clan. We decided it was time to divide Fonzie into two parts: the ‘core’ members (the initial group of friends) and the ‘war team’ (those that joined our clan).

Unfortunately, our war team didn’t last long: after only a few months we decided to call it quits. We wanted to focus on our other projects, though ironically in hindsight most of our plans for future projects were never finalized. We spend a lot of time playing practice and fun wars. We had a daily routine: come home from school, join IRC, chat for a while, play a few wars, have some fun talking on Ventrilo, eat dinner, and play some more matches before returning to our endless stream of useless chat in our IRC channel. Though we didn’t ‘accomplish’ a lot, 2005 was a very fun year.

Though it would soon become clear to me that we’d passed our peak. Our activity was diminishing and everyone was becoming more and more busy with school and/or work. Like a few others I was still blogging since my start in 2004, but beyond that there wasn’t much activity at our website. People started to chat on IRC less and less, and in 2006 I decided it was time to leave: our channel was dead.

For a while I thought the moment I had dreaded had finally arrived: the group was breaking up. It was to be expected; even though we’d survived high school and became a close group of friends, towards the end of college the reality of life started to set in. Things became more serious, and though we were still organizing the occasional lan party all of our other activities had ceased. I, however, had a hard time accepting this, and I tried to make it clear I wanted to do more stuff together. Counter-Strike and IRC was the glue that kept us together all these years, and now that they were gone our real-life activities were starting to cease aswell. Though we liked each other’s company, we all had a different opinion about what Fonzie was and where we were going.

Combined with a few other issues, this eventually led to a pretty severe argument between me and someone else in our group. I wasn’t happy with how thing were going: I tried to organize as many Fonzie events as possible but not everyone was trying as hard as I was. Everyone kept saying they wanted me to organize things like meetings, but most of them never came to fruitation because I was tired of doing this alone. Luckily, things were quickly settled after a short ‘fight’, and it was good to hear others say they were relieved the argument between us had been resolved.

Now we’re a few months later. Each and every one of us is still very busy, but we’re still meeting each other occasionally and we have a lot of fun when we’re together as a group. And lately, Ivan and I seem to be talking more frequently than the years before. Whatever may happen to Fonzie, I don’t think I’m going to lose contact with him and Machil any time soon. I’ve often asked myself and others what true friendship is, and it’s become obvious to me that there is no clear definition. It various from person to person: it depends on what you find important. But over the years, I found that there’s one thing that’s universal: the frequency of and ability to recover from a disagreement. During the nine years that I’ve known Ivan, we haven’t had a single big fight. Sure, we had our disagreements, and debates have often gotten very heated in the past. But after a short cool down period, everything goes back to normal. I honestly can’t remember a single thing that I was truly mad about. I guess we value each other’s opinions greatly, and there’s probably nothing we could do to scare each other off.

In the end, I must admit that Fonzie had a great run. The five active years we spend together were so far the most fun of my life. I still think back to all those evenings we talked on IRC, yelled on Ventrilo and played countless Counter-Strike matches. Sometimes I wish I could go back: it was only three years ago but life seemed so much easier back then. There was almost nothing to worry about and under normal circumstances (read: when we were not playing a game) everyone got along. We were just having fun.

Unfortunately, I can’t go back. I can only think about the wonderful times we had. Writing this now, I don’t think we had a golden year. Far from it. We had a golden era. Things may change, friendships may fade, but no one can ever take those years away from us. They’re in our memories now. They belong to the past.

They belong to Fonzie.