About Me
I’d always planned on putting together something about my past gaming experiences. After finally getting the site to a level that I’m happy with it seems like there’s no time like the present.
First things first, how the hell do you pronounce ‘Saate’?
Pretty simple – it rhymes with Ate, Eight, Fate, Late and Mate! Got it now? :p
Origins of the Name
In 1989 Sierra On-line released a computer game called Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero. I must have been 9 or 10 years old when I excitedly installed it on my parents XT computer (with a badass 20mb hard drive yo!). After loading the game for the first time and coming to the character creation screen it asked me for a name, after thinking about it I came up with ‘Saate’ and have used it in every game since for the past 20 years.
…damn that makes me feel old! For the sake of nostalgia I’ve taken a couple of screenshots of the game and included them below, this is where it all began!
Legend of the Red Dragon
I just had to include a bit about this! When I was about 14 or 15 I got my first modem, a Maestro 2400bps that was capable of downloading a whopping 300 bytes/second. In modern terms that might be a bit more familiar to some, to download the latest episode of LOST at 350mb it would have taken 13½ days going non stop.
One of the cool things about it was that it opened up a lot of local bulletin boards to me. I could dial in, access message boards and get my first real taste of ‘online’ gaming. My favourite game pretty quickly became Legend of the Red Dragon, or LORD, which as you’ll see in the screenshots was a text based RPG with some built in player versus player duelling and the like. You had a limited number of turns per day and it always reset at midnight, so it kept you coming back and was pretty addictive.
Definitely wasnt flashy but it sure was fun – there’s actually a lot of similar games on facebook even these days.
Ultima Online
In late 1997 Ultima Online hit the stores and was one of the first online games to truly deserve classification as an MMORPG. I was fascinated by the idea that I could work on raising my characters skills and come back the next day and keep doing it. Furthermore I found the player-governance of it all to be a really new experience. I could use a thief character to sneak about capital cities stealing real items from other players backpacks!
A friend taught me about player killers (PKs) and different ways to protect myself. Stuff like wearing a dull grey robe over my shiny armor to make me less of a target and so on. I also had my first taste of ‘farming’ and used my mining character and pack mules to head out and farm ore to make items and gold. Pretty quickly I had amassed and traded my way to a small fortune and was one of the few lucky ones to own a castle in Felucca (before the advent of Trammel).
I collected rare and unique items, for example blood and hay that had only been available at the start of the server. I also fondly remember sneakily logging in to the game from work on server maintenance mornings to try and get myself some of the semi-rare items that only spawned after a server restart.
I got into macroing and perfecting my skills later on, and even started a site not unlike this one with several different skill grinding guides. I started a hall of fame section where I posted screenshots that all the different people who used my guides sent in. One of my major and most favourite accomplishments was gaining Grandmaster level at Resisting Spells – basically from about 70% upwards you could typically gain about 0.2%-0.3% to the skill per day which meant it took a long time.
You can check out my ‘perfect’ 7xGrandmaster PvP character in the screenshots below as well as a screenshot of someone QQ’ing after I took 95% of their life with a single shot :p
Everquest
Ahhh good old Everquest. It was nicknamed Evercrack for a reason, and boy did it stand up to that name. I think I owe a lot of my success in World of Warcraft to the fact that I played this game for a few years. There was no such thing as a quest log or assigned quests in this game. If you wanted to level up the only way was to kill mobs. The game was also designed that no class could really solo in anything resembling a reliable or timely fashion.
You HAD to group if you wanted to level and the levels took a lot longer. There were even ‘hell levels’ which were several times longer than a normal level and would take you forever – hence the ‘hell’ title! There were no instances either, there was just ONE version of everything so if another group was already where you wanted to go you had to wait.
Typically you would find a spot somewhere then plonk your ass down and kill the same mob spawns over and over. Imagine doing heroic Violet Hold except with 100 waves, no bosses, and only getting 5% further through your current level. That’s about how it was – even getting to level 60 was a massive accomplishment.
I played a Bard on the Druzzil Ro server and was lucky enough to complete my epic weapon quest and gain my Singing Short Sword. I joined the guild Mythic Legion and had my first real taste at raiding ever. Since instances didnt exist the big bosses worked on a ‘first in force’ basis. It also meant there werent restrictions on how many people could be somewhere – I can remember days doing Plane of Growth and Ssraeshza Temple with 100 people.
One of my favourite things in Everquest were the different toys you could get, specifically the illusion masks which I built up a good collection of over the years. The crowning glory of my collection was the [Guise of the Coercer] high elf illusion mask. You had to do the rogue epic questline up to spawning the General in Kithicor forest, then betray Stanos (the quest giver) by killing him and giving his head to the General. It was a server first as the quest had almost no information available, and afterwards I even wrote a little guide on it.
wow Saate, i thought i was old school playing Spyro in Nintendo…..it is amazing to see how far gaming has come in the years :)
crazy asshat
What about the Saate outside of MMOs? Are you hiding any closit Barbie addictions? My Little Ponies?
You forgot rhymes with Satay!
you represent us gamers well:)it’s cool to see how mmo’s have changed over the years especially from EQ to WoW, i only wonder if the transition is going to be as great from WoW to blizzard’s mystery mmo…only time will tell;)
And crate, and tate, and rate, and kate, and gate…
OMG! you played Quest for glory? I thought I was the only person in history who played those games. I started with the second and went back to play the remake of the first, (I tried to play the original, but couldn’t get through it.. after playing the remake and the third and forth, i didn’t want to type everything anymore) This guide site is helpful, and i really enjoy it, but this is what made me comment lol. /cheers.
Saate,
Have you ever tried getting or thought about getting any arena achievements? You could get a lot more achievement points – and a few Feats of Strength. I’m sure you’d be amazing at them. I’d be glad to do whatever I could to help you out with tips or anything if you decide to play resto. You could add a whole ‘nother aspect to your seemingly flawless WoW experience!
Huge fan,
Ritedank
Now you’ve really got me thinking :) I did a little arena in the early days (Season 1/2) and at one stage we had a nice 5 man going but in recent years I have to say I havent really touched it too much. Mainly because I’ve always been an unpopular arena spec – ie not resto or feral/cat before nerfs.
It might just be time for me to take resto as an offspec again which will be a big learning experience for me having not healed since vanilla. Any suggestions for gathering gear? I’ve got a load of WG victory tokens for starters that might help?
I can’t believe you don’t have a single Everquest Screenshot with me and Jinky in it!
OMG Artie!! :) Now I’m gonna have to go through the archives and find one :p
wow saate u dident list me remember? we tryed 2s one time”? was fun tiems we got u 1 achivment dident we? :P
Wow! Quest for Glory was one of the first games I played (the exact first was Space Quest2) and became my addiction for many years. Still got a floppy somewhere with my character carry-over files, and a huge hint book which I bought for the sake of art bits and stories :)
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Hey man, interesting game history! good to have met ya.
Wow, your talk about Everquest reminded me of the good old days. Boy did I loathe going through the 50′s in Everquest. That game was so fun though, I think it is probably even more addicting than WoW if you know how to play well.
I’m working on my Insane in the Membrane achievement on Rivendare right now (my name is characters name) – so wish me luck, I’m trying to do it quickly rather than over the course of 6 months like most people. I’m trying to do 2,000 rep for each one on a daily basis. Hard, but I don’t think impossible. The most difficult one will be the Darkmoon Faire rep and perhaps Shen’dralar since my server has a terrible market and I can’t buy any of my pristine black diamonds on it without spending 300g +
I should probably note that I have already done my Bloodsail reputation.
Hey Saate- what is your take on trying to complete the Loremaster achievement/title before Cata expansion comes out? Do you think it’s worth busting rump to try and get them all done before the end- or wait until expansion and see if/how it changes?
OMG! Saate, you did LORD? The game Legend of the Green Dragon was based off of that. I actually helped with some of the coding on that game and know the creators. (I was an admin on the site). A bunch of different websites took it up though (source code was free) so there are tons of sites now that run their own servers. Wow. Nifty!
saate. thanks for sharing ur story. it was awesome to walk down memory. lane. do you remember Oregan Trails? haha that was my first puter game if i can remember. but the muds ; omg u bring back memories LOl me and my mom both played muds. for a long time acturaly.. anyways tanks for the amazing info and little stuff bout u.. :D
Thanks for checking out the site :) Glad that a few other people trigger off stuff like this :) Don’t think I played Oregon Trails back in the day although I have played the iPhone app remake recently! I was hugely into games like Civilisation, Master of Magic and all the Sierra Games early on. Very good memories!