John Dyer | eSports, Microsoft PR, Voice Acting, Supernatural Experiences

Tyler:

[0:00] So I'm thinking from now on, I'm sometimes going to do a little quote for each episode, or for some of the episodes where it's appropriate.

Tyler:

[0:09] Here's one. Quote. Even wild historical fantasies may have a greater impact than the carefully documented reconstructions of historians. Worrying, though the fact may be, what appears to count most is not whether the stories are true, but whether they are believed. Unquote. that's from Wouter J.

Tyler:

[0:31] Hanegreff in Western Esotericism A God for the Perplexed Thank you.

Music:

[0:36] Music

John:

[1:06] We'll be right back. well.

John:

[1:11] It all started when i was a wee boy uh no it's um i definitely had a love of gaming from a young age my parents threw me on i had like you know five and a quarter inch floppy reader rabbit on a crummy you know ibm dos machine and with all these weird mini games and stuff i didn't really care much for that and then as i got older my parents eventually evolved my uncle's big in production so when they're like what computer should we buy was always a mac of course so even then after the crummy dos machine was a mac machine it was like a mac 2gs or something i don't know what they were at the time but this mac was good enough that it had um and i had to look this up it was um what was it called vector something some wild ass like 2d game that was native to the mac os so i would kind of tinker around on that for a little bit this is when i was living in south florida when i was a little kid in fort lauderdale my parents divorced when i was a young age and lived with my mom and my sister in south florida my mom ended up dating a guy my stepdad informally really great guy named lenny kimmel was the former mayor of broward county he ran a process serving business and he had doom on one of his work pcs so when my mom picked up the admin on his process serving business i would you know she'd pick us up from school and go have to work for another few hours and so she'd plant me on the dos computer.

John:

[2:37] And i just straight he taught me how to dos prompt load quake and so there i.

John:

[2:41] Was you know idkfa and doing and all the weapons on, sorry, Doom, I think I said Quake, but Doom.

John:

[2:49] And found my love of shooters then. And I guess Lenny saw... He was a great, great, great man, great male role model. Shout out to his son, Josh Kimmel. But he saw my love of Doom and gaming, and Lenny later introduced me to Star Trek and formally to Windows PCs and stuff like that by basically forcing my mom to get a computer upgrade. And this would have been, gosh, I don't know, maybe around 90s, 95 or so. And the computer that he got my mom to purchase was a get ready for this a intel pentium 2 mmx powered machine with 30 i think we had third we were balling at that so 32 megabytes of ram that was incredible right 33.6 modem cd drive sound blaster 16 sound card and a 17 inch crt screen like i think at the time it cost like three grand usd which you know if you adjust for inflation that's probably like a six or seven or eight grand pc nowadays so like full to the tits pc right it was balling illustrate.

Tyler:

[4:00] Our age difference the first time i remember hearing like a commercial for a new processor was the pinium 4

John:

[4:06] Okay okay and that's part of the beauty of gaming right we'll touch on that more later down the road but like connects people across all ages and uh livelihoods right it's something

John:

[4:19] that connects which is beautiful yeah man um so there i was i was able to at this time in my life my dad was up in toronto where i'm from and was living down in florida with my sister and mom and so um would come up to visit my dad you know christmases and march breaks and summers and stuff like that um didn't he didn't have a computer didn't want to got one and i ended up finding myself at uh downtown on young street wandering into this place called mediascape which was a gaming retailer based out of toronto one of the first like these guys were operating with a full blown they'd they sold hardware too but it was first and foremost a gaming retailer like you know fully packaged product they were selling cd roms of games and stuff which is pretty unheard of at the time.

John:

[5:06] And I was owned by a guy named John Walsh, and he had a partner as well. They had a LAN set up in the back with eight machines on a local area network and an ISDN connection. And of course, a ton of different games. And they would charge by the hour, which is now a very established model of Internet Cafe. But back then, again, this was like 95, 96 at the dawn of gaming. This was like an Internet Cafe was unheard of. There was one other place called Electric Bean that operated in Toronto. Know these were the first two pioneers of cyber

John:

[5:36] cafes gaming cafes that I know of and so there I was as like 13 or something at the time um my dad knew that I was safe there and I guess since you know his parent eyes this was like some inexpensive version of keeping me interested and engaged during the day and so I was buying these blocks of cards you could buy them in bulk and spending all my time playing quake on their land there and online and stuff it was a keyboard gamer originally.

John:

[6:03] As painful as that is to admit uh arrow keys to look around i think i used like a and a and z to look up and down and as kludgy as that was got by with that and what was really cool about mediascape was that all of the staff you know there was a guy named ben who um did the hardware john harley shout out to demo boy good friend of mine still um a bunch of guys there after work would close down and we would all play quake on land which as you might recall like getting that low ping.

John:

[6:29] Network experience was amazing right like you just that was the joy of the land back in the day because uh client-side prediction wasn't a thing um if you didn't have a rocking connection like an isdn or up you were suffering like a high ping time probably of like you know 85 or 100 plus.

John:

[6:46] And that would have been a low ping if you had a two-digit ping that was good uh and so land was where it was at if you could get access to it like even back in those days if you were practicing for a tournament that was even semi-serious you weren't playing internet you were playing on land you'd invite people over and you just practice on land non-stop to get that local responsive edge and i think it was around that time that i eventually switched to mouse and keyboard which was great team invert i gotta say i don't know how that happened i think because there were just a bunch of computers i happen to just use one that had it inverted and got used to it um that always makes me laugh when people try and decipher like why you choose one or the other i don't think there's an answer it's just whatever you happen to get used to but i am on team invert and uh john harley demo boy actually started stoking my interest in writing my own quake scripts at that time using the console to basically build like effectively what was like intro level visual basic or like super rudimentary scripts uh where you know you'd press a key to scan through a bunch of different weapons and in a priority sequence and it would pick the one that you did have that you wanted the most and if you press the key again it would toggle to another one in the sequence and just little things like that that gave you a little bit of an edge over other plays you could do rocket jump scripts if you wanted to that was your thing i kept it organic in that respect but.

John:

[8:05] Um yeah first cut my teeth on quake one with mouse and keyboard there was always remember there was a guy that guy john walsh one of the owners would come in and he would use this controller called a space orb at the time which was this goofy ass thing it kind of looked like the size and shape of a current day xbox controller except the entire right side of it was a giant rubber ball and you would use it i think it was designed intentionally for like flight sims or flight games or like descent or games like that were like spacecraft right and so the idea would be that you'd use the ball to move up and down and around in a 3d environment and then you know you'd have a i think it had a d-pad on the left with buttons and stuff but he would clean up even with that kind of advanced control he was wiping the floor and quick with people even with mouse and keyboard at that time uh so you know getting off a keyboard was pretty important and uh that was i think right around the time when q q95.bat came out i don't know if that is beyond your ears as well sir but um basically q95.bat was like a updated version of i don't i can't don't think it originally launched with quake or if they patched it i might need to fact check on that but.

John:

[9:16] Q95.bat basically enabled quake gamers to use the tcpi protocol to play internet games and quake which before you before that it was just grayed out you didn't have the option to play on the internet right so again this is before server browsers this is before there were any server browsers in games there were no third-party server browsers yet uh so i mean i just happened to.

John:

[9:42] Know servers because the guy some of the guys at mediascape literally told me servers to play on one of them was quake.spacetech.com so that one had a dns which became nice and easy to remember but if you didn't have one with a dns you were writing down ips and you know like forward slash join and typing in that ip to get on that server right so fast forward i'm i'm going back down to florida and oh my god i got to get quake on this machine so i made lenny going by quake and was on my 33.6 dial-up it's still on the east coast you know florida toronto so not too far thankfully uh but was playing with these while i think i had like a 200 plus ping on these servers and I was playing CTF or Deathmatch or Rune. Rune Deathmatch was really huge back then. I don't know if you recall that, but... Wild wild mod where you could pick up one of different i don't know like 15 different runes that would give you some crazy ability uh and it was just chaos chaos you know.

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