Aaah, nostalgia, nostalgia... (lots of old stuff)

As I'm sure a lot of us are doing, I started going through folders, files and screenshots I had long forgotten existed. Friends and players you haven't seen or talked to come out of nowhere, all moved by the end of this fantastic game, and you start telling old stories. And since I think a few things I have here are quite funny, definitely nostalgic, I thought I'd share.

Let me tell you a bit, without wanting to bore you: I joined the CoH forum, if memory serves, November 21 2001. More or less. NCSoft wasn't even there, Jazz, Geist and MacAllen were the forum admins. The game was announced for Spring 2002. Heh. What followed was what felt like an eternal wait for the game release. But the pre-beta community was the most incredible bunch of people and funny enough, I was the guy with the 2nd most posts back then. Ah, sweet student years with lots of free time.


Have a look at the CoH page back then:
http://web.archive.org/web/200202021...com/powers.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/200307030...oh.com/forums/

Man, I miss those colors.


Okay, first and foremost, my priced jewel: the original CoH trailer from 2001.
http://depositfiles.com/files/y4rs5k8s6

It's too cool to not watch. Devs, I'm still waiting for the summersault jump. And who the hell are the Twilight Men, Seraphim, Revelation, Fear Factor and the Killing Crew? Posi, you can't leave without telling!

Talking about changes:









Talking about Positron/Matt, my first brush with him must have been... 2002? Maybe early 2003. It was the Surviving 8 character design contest and I came up with a character called Scirocco. An old beduin with sand powers. I was even a finalist. But hey, turns out Posi had a character called Scirocco, too. Which, I guess, is the one we came to know. But back then I was somewhat peeved. Until I received this, at least:

I still have those.

I actually got in serious trouble with Aura once... I think it was E3 2003. The character creator was shown and usable for the first time and I asked a forum buddy who was attending to create my namesake hero, Poison, and take a picture. Which he did. I felt like the king of the hill. You have to consider, pre-beta we were all creating characters without knowing if we would actually be able to translate them into the game, costume or power-wise. And I was the first to have his character created ingame, eagerly linking to the pictures in my sig. Which made Aura think that I had hacked into the servers. Glad I was able to clear that up! *phew* But too bad I lost those screenies somewhere.


Some of you might remember the excitement when beta started in winter 2003. I was seriously pissed when I wasn't invited for the first wave. Testing was only on 2 and a half days, about 2-3 hours each and I would have had to get up at approx. 3am, since I was in Europe. But I wanted in. 2nd wave rolled around, still nothing. I was raging! I had devs telling me to be patient... heh.
Then came the third batch and FINALLY, I made it in. As well as many friends, so we turned out to be the BEST beta batch, of course. Naturally, we couldn't tell anyone that we were in. And we kept our pokerfaces. Until Gamespy published a screenshot:

And people recognised Bugbite (green and brown on the left) and Poison (gasmask guy in the back. Also: Galaxy City!). Whoops, cover blown!

Fun fact: since the beta sessions were so short, people would log back into the character creator and let it run for hours and hours, just to play with it. As long as you didn't log out or try to registerthe hero, it didn't matter that the serves were down and you could keep going.


There's so much more to tell, so many details, so much fun, so many memories...
I used to spend hours going through PIGG files, editing demos by hand, guessing enemy names just to get a first look at some AVs. I had screenshots of many of them long before the lvl50 content was out, which was just cool. Btw, why did we never get the Nemesis horse?
Then my work on the revamped CoH Warcry. All the characters I have drawn over the years! And the times my pics were printed in the comic. Plus Poison's wonderful, misscolored comic cameo!

But okay, before I start boring you, I'll stop this, roll up in a corner and rock back and forth, mumbling about the good old times. Hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane and I hope to read your stories!

wow I actually prefer the older power logos , man Poison you are a treasure trove of old content <3

Oh man I remember those forums.

Remember those short beta sessions (Was known as Technoccult back then). And the fun with the name reservation stuff going from beta to live.

And having to wait 2 weeks after the 3-day head start as the box was shipped to England So I could get my activation code. For years I was always behind on my Vet badges cos of that , til that bug adjusted it.

I remember when they had those origin logos on the character select screen, was pretty bummed when they removed them.. Which was around CoV's launch iirc?

Interesting how the origins all refered to human back then though. "Superior Human" must have evolved into Natural. I suppose so we could use it for Aliens and whatnot.

There was also the whole thing about how origin would affect your character. This is from memory of the old descriptions on the site but:

Mutants could have the highest number of powers (8) I think but had the lowest cap for how powerful their abilities were.

Altered Human could only have 4 powers. But those powers could become stronger than any of the other classes.

Cyberware and Gadgeteer, Magical Powers and magical Artifact were different from each other due to power source. The ones with external power sources needed to be recharged externally (like Green lantern) and they could get items to carry around to recharge their batteries, the internal ones ran of the characters stamina.

Superior Human had (almost) no powers, but all other classes were skill capped. So a SH could become much, much better at using weapons, items etc... than any of the other classes. Certain types of attack had their damage dependant on the accuracy, so a SH could potentially do as much damage with a thrown knife as a Ah could do with a plasma blast.

Its scary I remembered that stuff without having to look it up.