Grid Game (2)

Grid Game is my attempt at a serialized fiction using Armagetron Fortress as my material. In Part 1, Halfwall Holding, a retired player, started challenging the legend of Leo, the game’s premier player and personality. In Part 2, Halfwall fills us in on his own story.

“Well, it was about five years ago now. I had just left a clan whose name none of you will recognize and set out to start my own team. This was back when we still played Ladles with sixteen teams, so you played against the best much more often than today. Great players still floated around casual games. In fact, for the most part, there was only one or two fortress servers with any amount of people in them.”

“Anyway, I was on my own again, looking for some teammates. At just about the same time, the old Diamond Exchange clan was breaking apart. They had won a couple Ladles and were quite a good team. I had swept against them a bunch, and had developed a friendly rivalry with one of their attackers. His name was version_zero. Anyone ever heard of him?”

Silence still.

“I didn’t think so. Well, neither of us were elite players, but we held our own. Some of those D.E. guys stuck together, but version_zero wanted to try something new. The D.E. faithful had this kind of ultra-competitive outlook. They had been caught cheating a couple times, but wriggled out of any sort of suspension. So he and I founded a new team, which we named Full Arc.”

People loved listening to Halfwall talk, and rarely did he talk about the past. Most of the time he criticized yesterday’s games or tomorrow’s lineups, just like the rest of them. Today, though, he was on the subject of his old team, Full Arc.

Full Arc began like most clans do. It began when a couple people decided they wanted a team of their own, and that they wanted something different.  Halfwall had played for some very good teams back then. He was regarded as a reliable sweeper and a solid player. Rarely, though, did he inflict his will on the game. Very rarely. He did not have that type of strength, that intangible element that seem to surround certain players.

Halfwall did have another air about him though. Almost everyone found him immensely likable. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he carried a reputation of being a ‘nice’ player. Nice players did not have that inner fire that made great players do what they do. Nice players could be good, but they could never be great. Halfwall had always been a nice player.

Accordingly, his new clan was instantly likable as well (this likability followed him). Their new web home was peppered with good luck messages and greetings from many various players. But for a while Full Arc was just version_zero and Halfwall in dialogue. Two players hardly fill out a team.

If Halfwall was well known and well liked across the grids, version_zero had hardly any reputation at all. He was quite, and players generally projected his clans character onto him. He had been an early member of Diamond Exchange; it had been a better citizen in its early days. He stuck around and did not complain when younger, louder and more skillful members started causing trouble. Version_zero knew no other team. But when things fell apart, he knew he wanted to be part of some better. And so, he found the friendly, likable Halfwall.

“Full Arc started off as just me and him, and it was for a several weeks. It looked like we weren’t going to field a team for the next Ladle, Ladle 43 I think it was. So, we decided to just make an open team. This turned out to be a great decision.”

This type of independent team building struck many of the listeners in Jim’s Café as novel. They were used to simply be put on a team with a bunch of other members of Jim’s or else a team drawn randomly from an even larger group. Sometimes these teams would decide to form and keep the same roster for a couple weekly Ladles, but mostly not. Players belonged to a server, not a team.

Of course there were the professional teams. The professional teams played in private, signed their players to contracts, and operated like small nations. TRONIC had become highly legalized and regularized, and much of the power was in the hands of these professional teams. TRONIC was indeed “self-organized,” and those who self-organized best organized themselves atop a hierarchy. Few players thought about this, and at least in Jim’s they were focused on Halfwall’s retelling of his past.