Today is my fifth COH anniversary.

I've been playing COH since May 27th 2005. That's a really, really long time.

Before ED. Before the aggro cap. Before newspaper missions. Before villains. Before PVP zones. Before Veteran Rewards. Before the buff icons could stack. Before Task Force Commander and Elusive Mind. Before the greenline reached Skyway or Founders' Falls. Before Croatoa, Ouroboros, Pocket D, Midnighter Club, Cimerora or any of the villain zones. Before Supergroup bases and salvage. Before Inventions and the Market. Before real numbers. When controllers could summon many copies of their pets. When a tank could herd an entire zone into a corner and a blaster could nuke them all at once. When Faultline's dam was intact, and Vanguard hadn't moved into the Rikti Crash Site. When Hamidon was killed by holding the nucleus by a truckload of controllers.

Dang, I feel old.

Things I remember fondly:

* The first badge I earned was "Land Locked" in Galaxy City. A friendly high level blaster told me to "stand here" and that's when I first learned that badges were something you could earn by doing stuff. I had "Celebrant" before, but I didn't know what the deal was about it.

* Completing the Terra Volta trial for the first time with my Illusion/Empathy controller, after failing it 14 times in a row with an empathy defender (which I deleted). That was the moment that Doctor Leo became my main character.

* Blinkie Finder. Back in 2006, the Dr. Quaterfield TF was broken and the blinkies you had to click to complete the mission were invisible; you had to find them via sound and click on the floor where they would be. But those blinkies would show up when recording a demo of the level, so I wrote a program to parse the demo files and show where each item (including the blinkies) would be in the level. I still use that program when I've ran around a map 30 million times and I can't find the last objective (the in-game feature for this, introduced recently, doesn't work every time).

* Splasher, though I stopped updating it when it didn't play nice with Windows Vista (and then lost the source code). Let's face it, the default loading screen of the game gets really boring very quickly.

* Having my Supergroup base featured in the City Scoop. Though they didn't get to see the "real" look, because I'd customized the textures.

* The Issue 10 closed beta, with all the European folks. The great beta experience contributed to making Issue 10 my favorite to this day.

* Rickrolling Lord Recluse.

* Winning the "City of Commercials" machinima contest and getting a nice box of COH stuff in the mail from it. I still have the letter signed by Lighthouse, Ex Libris, Niviene and Koschej.

* Winning in the GameTrailers video contest, though they never gave me the prize (gave up after six months of reminding them via email).

* Earning Bug Hunter. Twice.

* Soloing the Imperious Task Force with my Radiation/Sonic defender.

* Finally getting every single badge that could be earned through actual ingame "work". I joined 10 supergroups and got them all their Combat Logs badge (100 million healing) on the way of getting my Empath badge (which was 1 billion healing).

* Completing the ideal build for my main character, which includes 5 Panacea sets and a purple set slotted in... Brawl.

* Transferring to Justice to learn how to raid Hamidon properly, then going back to Freedom and leading them nearly every weekend since then.

Whoa, you read all that? Okay, here's your prize: first 10 people to reply to this post with a global handle get 100 million influence via gleemail.

It's been a good five years. Here's to May 27th 2015 finding this game in good shape.

@Soul Touch

Hopefuly you'll stay around another 5 years - I've been here since 25th of december 2004.

Congrats Leandro. You've had a lot of neat experiences. And the Rickroll was classic!

@Doc S

City of Heroes? Man, only cheeseball lamers play that game. And for five years, you say? You have a serious problem. Someone should stage an intervention.

Grats on your 5th.

@Fury Flechette

Ack, I missed my own anniversary.

* Originally I picked up CoH as a way to pass 6 months while my then-girlfriend went around the world. Now it's 5 years later, she's my wife and we have 1.75 kids and I'm still playing. That's pretty darn impressive. Still only got 2 50s though. That's less so*

@Carnifax

Congratulations on your anniversary! We've come a long way in this game, and it just keeps getting better!

My global handle is @Spellbinder

Heh. Congratulations. It's been a long, wild ride.

By looking at Carnifax's account I just remembered that the forums have the EU/NA accounts merged. I'm sending the gleemails from a NA account, I don't know if you'll get it if you're in the EU!

5 gleemails sent, 5 to go...

Do not feel old, young one.

Since the days when The 300 strode the streets of Paragon there have been those who were there before you. As The Original 100 were there before us.

To see the next generation mature. Grow. And become the supers they were meant to be is always pleasing.

Congratulations on your past successes and may more continue for you in the future.

@All Star

Since Ive been here a little longer than you, do I get to call you youngin?

Send the money to @damz

now now now now now now now now now!

I was enjoying your post of your memories but then greed kicked in after i saw the word money

congrats on the 5yrs. and good luck on being here for another 5 yrs.


@Deadly Twilight

Congratulations on 5 years of being with CoH. Wish I had knew about the game then.

(i'm not sure if i'm too late, but @sonicswipe)

I still got 100 million influence here for the next NA account to post its global!