Gamers That Became Pioneers

1up has a feature up looking at videogamers that have become pioneers. They profile several folks who have made an impact on gaming as a hobby, and the view of gaming in the world at large. The piece includes people like Patrick Wildenborg (the Hot Coffee whistleblower), Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe (makers of Counter-Strike), Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, and (most infamously) Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. From a more upbeat part of the piece, on Counter-Strike: "[CS] is one of the most ubiquitous and popular games ever made, period -- Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly. Such a statistic is even more mind-boggling considering the humble roots of the game -- both Cliffe and Gooseman were college students at the time of the project's inception. They had some amateur experience in the disciplines they brought to the mod; Cliffe had previously mastered several gaming websites, and Gooseman had done programming and modeling work on other fairly popular mods like Navy SEALs and Action Quake 2."

Comments

Klebold and Harris Pioneers?

[Skynet]

Of what? Killing innocent people and fueling the media frenzy that violent games create killers?

Re:Klebold and Harris Pioneers?

[MMaestro]

School replaced agrariran work responsibilities with industrial training responsibilities. Of course kids hate school, most people hate to work, but it's a necessary part of survival.

Except for the fact that with work you can at least SEE the end result. If you don't chop wood in the morning, you're gonna freeze your ass in the evening. If you don't plow the land, you aren't getting dinner. If you don't get the fence up, your livestock are gonna run off or get eaten by wild animals.

With school, if you fail a test you don't find out about it... usually for several days. If you are doing badly in a class and your teacher doesn't tell you about it, you only find out about it later... at the end of the quarter/semester. If you don't do your homework, you get a homework grade... which you can usually make up by doing really well on tests and exams.

Hell you can say the same about work as an adult. You don't want to work? Fine, you don't get paid. You don't want to go to school? Fine, you don't get a piece of paper that does not necessarily guarantee you a well paying job in the future in the first place.

ftw

[Chaffar]

Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly.

I wouldn't call an hour spent playing CS a "loss"... and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only CS addict here :)

Re:Steve Polge

[Osty]

How about Steve Polge, probably unknown to many. He created the Reaper Bot for Quake which got lead him to a job at Epic Games working on the A.I. for Unreal at the basics for Botmatch which in the end resulted in Unreal Tournament.

Or David "Zoid" Kirsch, who built the first CTF mod for Quake, which lead to his efforts on the Linux ports of Quake 1 and 2 and eventually landed him with Retro working on the Metroid Prime series.

Quake was a revolutionary time period in the history of games. It marked the first time enthusiasts could really create full-on games (Doom modding was pretty limited) based on a commercial engine, for free. As mentioned, the ubiquitous CTF game mode you find in everything these days was created by an individual modder. Squad-based strategy was pioneered by the guys who wrote TeamFortress. You could find just about anything, from racing games to flying games to future or fantasy games and just about anything in between. The modern FPS landscape owes its very existence to those original modders, and yet we barely even remember their names. How sad.

Putting the Columbine idiots along with people who

[kinglink]

actually did something to benefit the industry? I can live with the hot coffee "whistleblower". He at least found something unique, but the people who pulled out guns and killed innocent people are on the list for what? For Doom mods? If you could use a computer and write a simple line of code you could mod Doom, it wasn't just a simple game to mod it was beyond easy.

It's not like they did anything to really change the world, they just played videogames so the MEDIA actually blamed videogames, they don't appear to have actually changed video games in any particular way except to give it huge media attention (attributed to that moron Clinton claiming how Doom and Mortal kombat (1) were hurting our kids and shouldn't be sold... 5 years after their release. If it wasn't for the media using the story for everything then we wouldn't have gave a shit about two idiots and we wouldn't have even realized they played games, they would just be known as too idiots with guns.

I mean you have a list of influencial gamers, Penny arcade, the hackers on Ms. Pacman, the guys who did Counterstrike, the single most popular mod ever, and yet somehow you diminish them all by putting these two guys who just snapped and tried to kill people. Exactly how does that make them pioneers?