Then as I got older, I started reading more books. It was around 1992 when I was about 8-years-old that I remember reading my first RPG adventure story, where each page described a scene in the story and you had to make decisions which effected the outcome of the story-line. For example, Pg. #1 might say "You are going into the dragon's lair to save the princess. What will you bring with you?" Then at the bottom of the page, it might say "I will take my sword! (Turn to Pg. #7), I will take my torch! (Turn to Pg. #12), I will take my dog! (Turn to Pg. #8)" or something to that effect. The object of these kinds of RPG books was basically to make it to the very end of the story without dying. It wasn't very advanced, considering there were no maps or dice or character sheets. But it was fun for that age group at the time and it gave me an exposure to reading. Then as I got older, I started playing board games and reading more advanced tabletop RPG books by publishers like White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast, which is where I really started to become a roleplayer myself.
By the time I was 13-years-old, when AOL first released AIM instant messenger, I was already an experienced roleplayer and gamer. During my adolescence I had learned how to play Checkers, so by the time I was 13-years-old, I was already a talented Chess player and Stratego player as well. I was never undefeated, but from a very young age I had started playing turn-based strategy board games with people who were much older than I was, including a couple of Masters and Expert members of the U.S. Chess Federation who were in their late-40's and early-50's, so being a young teenager it was quite a unique experience for me and I became quite talented by the time I got my first home computer.
I grew up during the competitive golden era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, so I was privileged enough to witness an explosion of different on-line roleplaying sites, chats, forums and games. Prodigy was my service provider back then and the internet was much different than it is today. I was running Windows-98 which was compatible with Publisher-97, a program I used to design webpages and RPG sites. I was about 14-years-old when I designed my first RPG webpages, complete with JPEG files, character sheets and story-lines. I downloaded AIM instant messenger as soon as it became available to me. Then right around my 14th birthday in 1998, Yahoo! released the YIM instant messenger. It was right around this time when I became exposed to chat-room RPG's.
Angelfire was an internet service which provided free web hosting. Yahoo! had a service called GeoCities which was quite similar. A lot of the earlier RPG sites were hosted by either Angelfire or GeoCities and I was interested in both of them. Back then, most places were either running IRC or Java chat. Multicity offered a free Java chat interface for websites, so many early RPG's that I was exposed to came from GeoCities message boards (known as forums) and Multicity or Yahoo! chat rooms. As far back as I can remember, on-line roleplaying has always remained basically the same, with some changes in internet service providers over the years, but the classic RPG's of today were already popular even back then. Dungeon Masters, Dragon Slayer, Golden Axe, Vampire Dark Ages, Werewolf the Wild West, Mage the Ascension, Hunter the Reckoning, Star Wars, Marvel Heroes, Sword & Sorcery, DC Universe, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Lord of the Rings, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, Pokemon, Dragon Ball and many different kinds of Japanese Manga were just as popular in 1998 as they are today. Microsoft released MSN instant messenger in 1999 and although it was late on the scene, MSN chats were soon engulfed in the same flame that had sparked the on-line RPG era.
In the beginning, chat-room RPG players were still practicing the oldest form of speed-based roleplaying. This was your typical fun-loving style of chat-room roleplaying which didn't have a whole lot of rules. It became known as "Freeform," though later this style developed into more complex forms of chat-room RPG as rulesets were added or written down. It was around this time that the term "Auto" was created to distinguish one style of roleplaying from another. In some chats, Auto was quite popular. In other chats, Autoing was against the rules. It was around then when some players from the Arts & Entertainment (Ayenee) section of Yahoo! Chat decided to write their own rules for chat-room RPG players. Their ruleset became forever known to chat-room roleplayers everywhere as Type-2 (T2), the standard for speed-based textual combat. Back then, there was another RPG realm in Yahoo! Chat under the Romance section known as Eden, and regular users to that realm were called Edenites.
Soon, the Ayeneeans and Edenites were in the process of making their own RPG web sites. Previously, they had also written down the rules for another system called Type-1 (T1), which later became the standard for turn-based textual combat. T1 and T2 tutorials became widely available through the Eden's Era website and soon these RPG styles were being spread all over GeoCities and Angelfire into different forums and chatrooms like Bravenet, Homestead and Multicity, then later to places like the ProBoards forums. Comicity continued to use Freeform, just as they had done since the very beginning on AOL, until their chat was hacked in 2001. I was there for the declining era of Comicity and for the golden era of Multicity, which is cool. It was fun to watch and interesting to see how on-line RPG has progressed throughout the years. It really has been a special privilege for me.
Unfortunately for myself and many others, Prodigy was bought out and made private by Yahoo! in 2001, thus putting an end to our free web hosting and Java chat services. All of my old webpages, including one of my first on-line RPG sites ever, vanished without a trace. Needless to say, Windows 2000 was not compatible with Publisher-97 and webpages became more difficult to make for me, so I stopped making them. I took a long break from roleplaying after that. It wasn't until just recently in 2015 when I really started getting back into it again. It's funny to see how much has changed over the last decade or so, yet so much is still the same and remains intact. I don't know why I'm really sharing this story with everyone now, but I hope that maybe somebody might find entertainment from reading it. It's really interesting for someone like me to visit the RPG scene all these years later and still find Auto, Freeform, T1 and T2 tutorials on the forums of just about every RPG community I visit. It's almost like a time capsule. Sure, some edits have been made and some authors or gamemasters have added their own spice to the mix of things, but to be as old as I am and see that RPG players still use the same basic styles we used back in 1997 and 1998, it really brings a smile to my face. Thank you all for your devotion to on-line RPG, it has truly been worth my time to meet all of you here in RolePlayGateway and I'm sure we will have some fun.