Many Welps

I’m writing this post much later in the day than usual. Work has been super busy and I’ve been trying to start a new habit of actually going to the boxing club I belong to. It’s all been eating up my usual free time. Thus an evening post instead of a morning post.

This was one of the topics Belghast brought up on the first day of Blaugust:

• Write  about someone you met through gaming that has turned into a friend that transcended a single game.

So every once and a while I’ll post about what me and my friend Greg (somtimes referred to as Jay) are up to in games. He’s my go to co-op partner for just about everything and we first became friends because of our love of gaming.

I first met Greg after I had just moved to a new town right third grade. We were in cub scouts together, for a year we went to the same school, we became really great friends and I remember the first game we were ever hooked on. It was a Pokemon Trading Card computer game, I’m actually pretty sure it was a demo. There were a couple of pre-made decks and you battled the computer AI for a bit and then it tried to sell you booster packs over the internet. We loved it though an spent a lot of time after our cub scout meetings playing it.

As time went on we went to different schools and kind of drifted apart. It wasn’t until around 10th grade or so that we reconnected over games. This time around it was free to play MMOs, mostly of the korean variety. We spent entire summers playing Grand Chase, Grand Fantasia, APB Reloaded, and others. Senior year of high school is when we got super into Monster Hunter Tri and Valhalla knights on the Wii.

When we both went off to college in different states we tried to stay in touch as much as possible. We used to talk on the phone and watch old episodes of Power Rangers and Digimon when I was having a hard time adjusting to being away from home. Any time I would come back home for a break I’d always go over to his house and we’d play as many games together as we could before we both had to go back to school. We played Demon Souls until 4am one night over winter break trying to finally beat it. There was another summer in college where we were determined to beat RoboPit for the Sega Saturn. To this day we’re still 5 victories away from beating it.

After college I wasn’t able to go back home as often but I was able to get a headset and a PS4. We mainly keep in touch these days via games. Without games I don’t know that we would be as close of friends as we are today. He’ll be the best man at my wedding this October and he’s basically a brother to me now. We’ve been friends for 17 years and none of it might have happened without that one Pokemon trading card game.

Through Greg I’ve also met some other people who have become close friends as well. About 3 years ago we all started playing Trove together and started a skype chat. I only knew Greg in the chat at the time but over the years Christian and Josh have become great friends too. We all even started a Twitch channel together a year and a half ago. I’m sure I’ll talk about that sometime in the near future. We’ve since stopped playing Trove but the skype chat has never ended. We all try to get together once a week to play a group game.