How did you discover GWJ?

SixteenBlue wrote:

I googled "Pig hunting teenage Alabama" and ended up here.

That's beautiful.

RnRClown wrote:

I'm wager that I'm still relatively unknown. I may even be disliked due to a few clashes of opinion in P&C discussions. Nevertheless, I visit the site frequently, daily when work does not blur the lines of one day to the next, and it's a genuinely great place to be a part of.

I remember chatting to you via PM about how your dad reminded me of Wolverine. So in that respect, you're certainly known to me.

I'm not entirely certain. It was either through Rock Paper Shotgun or the gaming podcast that Justin Mackelroy used to do back before Polygon. Pretty sure it was RPS, though. I think they must have linked a GWJ article in their Sunday Papers feature.

Huh, I never saw the previous two threads...

I wish I remember the name of the game, but I was searching for a review of a game. I think the third or fourth hit was a site called "Gamers With Jobs" and I thought, "Holy crap, that's me!" But then I started reading the review and was blown away at how familiar the voice sounded, at how familiar the perspective. It was if one of my best friends who writes well had written a review for me.

Every other review I'd read online always had parts that either made the writer sound like a secret marketer for the game, or was written by someone who had to show me how *uber* he was to all of gaming that a mere mortal like me could not understand.

So that was July, 2003. And then I saw the forums and thought, "My People!"

Okay, just for fun I found my first post (which is easy to do in your account tracking menu):

July 2nd, 2003

Roo wrote:

Okay I''m slowly getting talked into getting Planetside, in part just so i''ll understand all of the acronyms you all are slinging around. Assuming I do get Planetside anyone mind pointing me to good newbie guide type stuff (HL and CS are only FPS games I''ve played. assuming you don''t count the demo version of doom back in 1995 or whatever).

Ok, I'm obviously missing something - how are you guys finding your first post via Account -> Track? I can see the list of threads, ordered by most recent update, but the one at the bottom isn't the first thread I posted in I'm sure...

omni wrote:

Ok, I'm obviously missing something - how are you guys finding your first post via Account -> Track? I can see the list of threads, ordered by most recent update, but the one at the bottom isn't the first thread I posted in I'm sure...

Last post on the last page of that.

Edit: Huh, my first post was actually in a movie thread.

But the thread right at the bottom of the list has a post by me on Sep 11th. The thread 3 up from bottom has a post from me on Jan 26th of the same year... so it's listing thread in the order they were last posted in, not by when I posted in them, if that make any sense.

omni wrote:

But the thread right at the bottom of the list has a post by me on Sep 11th. The thread 3 up from bottom has a post from me on Jan 26th of the same year... so it's listing thread in the order they were last posted in, not by when I posted in them, if that make any sense.

Unless your first post was in one of the long-running threads, it'll tend to be on the last page. That said, you are correct: it's hard to be completely certain that you've found your absolute first post without going through all of the threads.

True, I was a slow poster so mine are mostly in order.

Just in case it wasn't clear, I was kidding. I looked up a good answer from an old Welcome, Perverts article. But someone did do exactly that.

Muraii is on his phone all day refreshing this forum so I decided to check it out. Nice group.

I 'hear' everything you say in Tina's voice now. You've got a free pass to talk about butts and zombie love.

I've been having some fun going down memory lane. If you want a huge laugh, check out When HL2 Came Out On That New Steam Thing.

We were so young and naive...but then, so were Valve and Steam.

And we sound so indignant with our "I want shiny disks I can see...none of this downloading what I own stuff for me!".

The other fun thing to notice is how short the discussions were back then. It's hard to find a thread with more than 100 posts, and most have far less than 50.

If you had shown us the Steam Summer Sale back then...we'd all have run screaming, or burst into song. Or burst anyway.

Roo wrote:

I've been having some fun going down memory lane. If you want a huge laugh, check out When HL2 Came Out On That New Steam Thing.

We were so young and naive...but then, so were Valve and Steam.

And we sound so indignant with our "I want shiny disks I can see...none of this downloading what I own stuff for me!".

The other fun thing to notice is how short the discussions were back then. It's hard to find a thread with more than 100 posts, and most have far less than 50.

If you had shown us the Steam Summer Sale back then...we'd all have run screaming, or burst into song. Or burst anyway.

That might be another fun thread. What was your first Steam game and how much did you chafe about not having a box and a manual?

Or maybe not if the answer is always HL2.

I avoided Steam for a long time. Oddly enough, my first Steam game, and the entry drug to the Valve-madness, DID come with a box and Manual. Civilization IV. Pre-ordered a boxed copy and when it arrived, I had to then download Steam and enter the key, which then proceeded to download the game and update it, rather than use that pesky disc thing.

Strange how opinions change so vastly. Physical media repulses me now. My two main PCs don't even have a DVD Drive at all.

Wouldn't be in my case. I jumped onto Steam for the first time with the Audiosurf beta. Having played so many MMOs without discs it wasn't that much of a bother to me.

My first Steam game was Football Manager 2009 (I still have the disk), because that was the first year that they made having a Steam account a requirement. The floodgates soon opened and I've never looked back.

To make an already short story shorter:

3MA > rabbit seems nice > I want to find some people to play DoW2 with > GWJ

Was searching for a casual World of Warcraft raiding guild and stumbled upon the old GWJ Blackhand alliance guild. Good times.

ThingumBob wrote:

That might be another fun thread. What was your first Steam game and how much did you chafe about not having a box and a manual?
Or maybe not if the answer is always HL2.

Hey, that would probably be a fun thread! I remember my first Steam game game was Day of Defeat Source, and I bought it on July 1st, 2009 (day I joined Steam too). We were planning a LAN party with some friends of mine, and one of them suggested we all get DoD instead of less... *ahem* legal versions. So I got my copy in preparations for that weekend, even though I was mildly annoyed at having a digital version of a game (think that was a first for me). We didn't play it in the end, but that was the beginning of my long-standing affair with Steam...

It's been so long I can hardly remember. I am 80% sure I saw GWJ somewhere on Evil Avatar and migrated over. Then stuck around here because I love gaming with this group.

I do know that the first thing I did here was play TF2 and that exploded into all the online gaming friends that I have now. All of you are awesome.

Amusingly, I think my first GWJ post was in a "Introduce yourself" thread almost 11 years ago.

I'm not a big poster. I probably read gone gold regularly for a couple years (?) before it went silent. I found GWJ not too long after that and lurked for years, reading the site several times weekly. I made an account maybe five years back and have slowly started posting here and there. This site was probably my biggest online distraction during the time I've spent in the mid-east parts of the world.

I've followed Bill Harris' blog on and off over the years. You can probably thank (or curse) him for my presence as well.

ThingumBob wrote:

That might be another fun thread. What was your first Steam game and how much did you chafe about not having a box and a manual?

Or maybe not if the answer is always HL2.

My first Steam game was a copy of Portal 2 downloaded with a key that came with the Playstation 3 version of Portal 2.

So kind of like a digital back-up copy.

...y'know if it weren't for that I probably still wouldn't have Steam at all. What clever bastards over at Valve.

I discovered the site back in 2007 but it looks like I only posted comments in the show threads or about articles for a long time. My first comment was on an article Momgamer wrote about online griefing and jerk players. I then eventually joined the WOW guild, began posting in the pile threads, and sadly found my way to the P&C forums where I have wasted far too much time.

Two weeks from now it'll have been exactly three years since I got a job, came on these forums via their podcast, and posted about that earthquake that hit VA / MD.

Then I started hanging out with the NC GWJers, and I realized that growing up didn't mean outgrowing having fun or doing things I liked. I was 22, living in a new place, and growing up quick due to a nonsense amount of tragedy. GWJ and it's folks were great to have around at the time, and now!

My favorite moment so far would be when Oily met me his reaction was basically, "Squee you are exactly what I expected." Then the slippery penguin blew our cover in Knights of Avalon, but we won anyway.

I came for the beer, stayed for the League of Legends crew.

Stalking Quintin_Stone. Also I'm pretty cool.

I'm sure I had searched iTunes for games podcasts. I had previously found Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer site, specifically about his class playing Fallout "preparing for the release of Fallout 3." I then happened on his well-considered podcast, and was inspired to hear someone slamming his brain against games. Then I searched iTunes and found a few other podcasts, most notably Rebel FM and GWJCC. My interest in the latter outlasted my interest in the former, due primarily to the energy the group brings to discussions. I like the Rebel FM folks but they sometimes languish and seem only grudgingly interested in their discussions.

A few months later I met some o' yous at my first, and only, Cincinnati S&T. I brought my wife! We gamings! There were laughters and fresh beer. Cards Against Humanity was literally on the table, and a great way to get to know just what foul kinds of folks gather in someone's basement to meet IRL OMG.

Spoiler:

The good kinds.

Now I exist solely to generate pageviews and burn down the GWJ Minecraft server.

interstate78 wrote:
Thin_J wrote:

Honestly I can't even remember.

I'm trying, but I have no idea.

This.

Been very long

I think I saw the name "gamers with jobs" somewhere and just thought to myself "hey maybe there's a crowd who's a bit more mature".

You brought me here. Like you told me Steam was safe when I wasn't sure. Stayed here for the community, podcast and more.

Certis wrote:

So cool reading all your origin stories! If you ever run into me at a convention or something it inevitably comes up because I'm always curious. Given how many people don't remember I assume people find the site when they're blackout drunk. Booze is the portal to GWJ like the wardrobe is to Narnia.

We'll always have the Cat N Fiddle. Hollywood forever!

I'm not totally sure how I ended up here. It was either through the links on the side of Dubious Quality, or (and this is probably more likely) it was listed as a recommendation on iTunes as I listen to handful of other podcasts that are distributed by Wizard Media. Or suggested because I was listening to Weekend Confirmed at the time.

I think I listened to the show for a year or two before finally starting to read the front page and the forums before de-lurking some time later. This is by far the best community I've found for talking about games and life in general