It’s like… u no.. or do u?

JC6 is finally here and it is finally a huge disappointment. Not only was the information way too old, the microphone especially apt to insert white noise whenever it wanted to, and the show over an hour and a half long; we just weren’t feeling “it,” where “it” is “drunk.” On the upside, we have some awesome music. And there’s the special feature at the end.

We had to split it into four parts.

{he chose the right guy to copy from on his final}

Stop coding.

Now that MARARTHON has officially taken its own life, there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest. I mean, they’ve bothered me for something like a year. That’s a long time if you think about it. (Also, I have the gift of Bourbon, so truth is coming more naturally to me at the moment.)

(Try to read between the lines a little bit more)

RE: Through the Lookingmaintenancecloset.

CLIQUE c. June 2004 (Irons in yellow, Gonzague to his right)

Marathon is the German Language of first-person shooters.

It is at times cumbersome, often full of subtleties, reviled or ignored by most unacquainted with its charm. To whom, then, do our own CLIQUE minds correspond?

Ryoko: Richard Wagner. Wagner is known for his dramatic, romantic, overblown musical style, the themes of which were eventually adopted by the Nazis. Ryoko’s maps are crazy big, grandiose, and so on. And he’s a Nazi.

He deserves nothing he has.

Treellama: Thomas Mann. Mann was an astounding writer, and is one of my personal favorites. He opposed the Nazis and went into exile during World War II. Treellama is pretty reasonable, and he privately hates CLIQUE. Like Treellama, Mann had better things to do than hang around those losers.

you guys are so negative :(

W’rkncacnter: This is where it gets tricky. I’m going with Karl Marx on the grounds that communism = JUICE.

HALF OF MY TEAM IS NOW OUT OF JAIL.

Thermoplyae: Thermo is kind of mysterious. He also likes numbers. Therefore, the most suitable choice is Gottfired Leibniz, one of two losers who invented calculus, and the man who brought us binary. I’m sure he would be just as content to program in ML as Thermo is.

*spills dixie cup beer*

Ray: If anyone had owned an imageboard based on Germany back in the day, it would have been Goethe. Let’s look at Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, from a Ray’s perpective—that is to say, Faust v. Mephistopheles: King of Fighters Romanticism Edition!!

then you will be 1/infinity as cool as me

Irons: I’m half-genius, half-crazy. People try to understand me and usually fail (unless they are my CLIQUE contemporaries). I created an übermensch named Hotmodal. I am Nietzsche.

loch nits olmec taps you the eight-foot-tall Burton

Before the #alephone IRC channel became as “popular” as it is today, and before a metaserver existed to allow people to play games easily, there was the Aleph One chat room on the AOL Instant Messenger servers. These were interesting times, when Ryoko was just beginning to test Red Spectrum publicly, when I was wreaking havoc with AORPG, and when W’rkncacnter was being the best keyboarder on earth. Then we got the meatserver and the chat room suddenly became locked.

Thanks to Appleswitch, I now have in my possession chat logs from that period of time, intermittent conversations from April 29 to October 12 2005. I’ve converted them to slightly more readable HTML and split the giant text file into daily digests. You can read the HTML here, and if you’re hard-core, you can pick up the text file here (~764kb, BZipped).

So, back in the day, when I was still running ITO as a Marathon site, we had the House of Luck Companion. It was a blog in which Wrk, Ryoko, and I wrote; Wrk and I covered JUICE stuff, while Ryoko handled most of the mapping articles. I deleted HOLC when I loched, but… Google Reader caches feeds; just found out! So I took the entire library of HOLC articles (nearly a hundred) and converted it as best I could into basic HTML. I might end up using a stylesheet on this page, but for now it’s pretty damn raw. There are many images missing and not all the words are still there. We were some pretty serious motherfuckers.

As I sit here, listen to gay stripper electro music, and explore the long-lost contents from my first laptop’s hard disk, I can’t help but succumb to the barrage of Marathon memories that come from that magical “AlephOne” folder located in my ancient home directory. Please remember with me…

…The odd little moment in the same group chat that prompted RyokoTK to utter the phrase “this shit is bananas”…

…The Bad Map Showdown between Ryoko and W’rkncacnter summer 2005 that culminated in the creation of Super Cool Kill Zone and its slightly superior friend, Carnage Vila 46…

……

…Hawkeyefile…

…Aleph One RPG, to which I sacrificed an entire night’s sleep. I didn’t know about tables in Lua, or much else, but I was damned if I let a few dozen if/then statements stop me. There was only one thing I could do: create the most revolutionary scenario ever seen by man, one line at a time, winning over people like W’rk, never stopping, never firing…

…The result of AORPG…

…Three Middle Fingers…

…Crashes and uncertainty for Marathoners and the impending Pfhorums apocalypse during the winter of 2005–2006, which culminated in BenUrban’s takeover of the #alephone IRC channel. Little did he know it would all end for him some day…

…Godot…

……

…The big dreams of a regular guy named Assassingao…

…Victory Dance I–holder of a million tomorrows, several simplici7y maps, a wall-climbing extravaganza, and something special from Goran himself. VDI really did suck, but who cared to say so at the time? Not I…

…Pfhortran…

…MOTHAFUCKA_TARGET…

…Pfhorums v0.0, Secret Leaked Beta Edition, Land of Dreams and of Nightmares…

…The first (and supposedly last) time I left Marathon because of real-life issues. Good thing I never came back…

…The time MoppyPuppy came to the AlephOne chatroom on AOL Instant messenger and complained that he had recently been raped by lesbians at the beach, in an incident involving leather straps, a pole of imprisonment, and oil…

…The first moments of nausea after the initial dozen links from Hentai Sama. After that dozen, it is all a blur…

…Film.mp4…

…Signing up to get active on the Alt.Games.Marathon newsgroup…

…My old habit of hosting games lasting 15 or 20 minutes, almost always on Beyond Thunderdome. There exist videos of such things, and one of my favorites is HR, Kim Lao, and me in a savage fight to the death that spans dozens of kills…

…When SBO not only had news, but exciting news…

…The first-ever Internet game c/o Aleph One’s developers…

…The downloads and debates over the Aleph One nightly builds, which used such startling new features as the metaserver and in-game chat. The same nightly builds that gave Treellama mind-shredding nightmares. The same nightly builds that hosted KawaiiPet’s Lua Olympic Games…

…loch…………………………………………..

The CLIQUE has existed in several forms over the years. I’ve been pondering the origins of the Marathon community’s (formerly) underground ruling body for some time now. Pondering and wondering. Let’s start with the Father of the CLIQUE himself, Ryoko.

In 2005, RyokoTK launched a network level that caused some stir among netgamers. It was part of a contest against future CLIQUE member W’rkncacnter to construct the worst possible netmap. Wrk’s Super Cool Kill Zone lost to the more experienced mapper’s Carnage Vila 46. The READ ME!!!!!!!!!!!!11 file contains the first glimpse at what the CLIQUE would later become (emphasis mine):

CARNAGE VILA 46!!
MAP BY RYOKOTK LOLOLLIN’

ALL U GOTTA DO IS PUT THE FILES IN THE FILE OTHER FILE AND PLAY LOL
EZ AS THAT.

IF U GOT PROBLMS THEN U GOTTA CALL GHOSTBUSTERS O MAYBE ME AT RKYOKOTK@GMLAIL.COM
I WILL PWN U ANY DAY IF U WANA PLAY ON CARNAGE VILA 46! OK?!

WELCOME TO LEET KREW.
LEET KREW PWN U!!!!
-RKYOKOTK 2005-4EVA!

So there it was: a (then-fictional) group of people called the LEET KREW. While LEET KREW did not exist, it was clearly part of Ryoko’s fantasy to be part of a clique. But when did the CLIQUE come into existence?

I have in my hands a document by none other than Ryoko, sent to me during the summer of 2006, called [r].rtf. It was made to describe the people who were allowed on my site, ITO, back when it first began to host maps.

[R]elic is a clan exclusively for the highest echelon of members of the Marathon community, intended for people who are good in many fields — not just mapping, or playing, but an amalgam of skills. Joining [R] is a difficult process, and most people who ask if they can be in will be excluded. Hopeful members of [R] need to ask either RyokoTK or Irons — the two clan leaders — for consideration.

[...]

What does the [R] represent? Well, it represents that you have those four qualities listed above: experience, intelligence, skill, and activity in the community. As [R]elic gains a bit more renown, people will begin to recognize the tag and make the connection. If you are a member of [R]elic, you will be expected to uphold those four values and maintain the image that the tag represents. If you don’t, you’ll be summarily kicked out. And, believe me, retaining the tag and pretending to be a member wouldn’t be a very good idea.

The benefit you get from being a part of [R]elic is that you have this certain level of respect — both from your fellow [R] members, but also from other users. You’ll enjoy a group of players that know what they’re doing, and are great people to play with/against.

That was that. A Marathon clan called [R]elic, and everybody wanted to join. There was initially great hubbub about who should be allowed in, and how we should go about dominating the net scene with our high-echelon output. Is it fate or linguistic coincidence that “clan” and “clique” begin with the same sound? Either way, we still had much to learn about running a successful CLIQUE, and [R] soon shed its earthly form.

The era of mass-pseudonyms, kicked off by the enigmatic Godot (Irons) and continued by big names like Karuma (Ryoko), and JUICEMAN (W’rkncacnter) commenced its second generation in the unassuming form of Hotmodal. Hotmodal’s express purpose was to form a new clan called qoou. [qoou], always written in lower-case, derived its name from the simple mantra that it wished to “turn noobs upside-down“:

qoou built up much the same following as [R]elic once had, in spite of its self-mocking origins, but often with the added benefit of pseudonyms; hotmodal, Blaze, JUICEMAN, and others provided mysterious facades over familiar personas. In due time, hotmodal disappeared, leaving qoou in even greater ruin than it had begun.

It was at this critical juncture that the true structure of the CLIQUE appeared in the guise of the JUICE. JUICEMAN’s often nonsensical ramblings about this mysterious substance/quality/philosophy attracted little attention during their initial phase on the metaserver, but they spread to the Pfhorums and took root there, influencing more than a few innocent users. It was at this time that the CLIQUE showed its true potential as an unconscious collection of the greatest members of the community. Another clan, the Eight-Foot Tall Burtons, popped up, attempting to organize the concepts of the JUICE into something more. The organization and self-consciousness stunted any of the explosive growth that could have occurred, and [8FTB] dissolved as quickly and easily at it had crystallized.

The CLIQUE soon forgot itself, acting naturally (as it should have done since day one). It slowly coalesced until one special day, when The One (earnest poster, or clever pseudonym?) proclaimed that RyokoTK, acknowledged ringleader of anything resembling elitism, was single-handedly ruining the community. The term “clique” came alive, and at some unknown moment, it earned its final all-caps form, CLIQUE. Its power has grown since its self-recognition; this growth will most likely continue unabated for some time.