Memory 013

In the middle of primary school, our parents had decided to get a family computer, which at that time was considered a sort of luxury item.

We weren’t country bumpkin that had never operated a computer; at our school, we had a class to do with them. However, we were still considered greenhorn on using them and were relatively new to what we call the internet.

Well, when we heard that we were going to get a computer in our house both me and Monster was thrilled solely because we would be able to play video games from the internet.

We had often seen many of our friends playing those flash games at their house which were very enjoyable to do. Often times me and Monster would be so envious of them having a computer to play at that we would beg our parents if we could stay over at our friend’s house so that we could play a little longer. It was to the point that in some weeks we were mostly at our friend’s house instead of our own house.

I presumed that was why our parents finally decided to get our family a computer. Just by that we were already packing our bags from our friend’s house and rushing back home. Our mother would often ridicule us about this when we were older saying that, “It felt like my sons finally came back home after a long war.”

Memory 014

Back in middle school, there was a buzz that came about with the boys in our class. It was the period of time where many of the kids began to grow interested in the internet. Most of the boys started getting sucked into the video-game part of the net. One famous game that was popular in our class was an online RPG game called Roonscape.

In there we create our own character and control it to do whatever we want in the world; whether it be fighting, cooking or fishing, there were many things that the game offered to the players.

Well back then me and Cloud used to play tons of it in our spare time.

One day the Kautz family son, Allen the Demon Lord, had openly declared a PVP (player versus player) match with his guild against our guild.

Back then our guild could be considered pretty strong due to how popular Monster was and how addicted all of us were in the game that we had devoted most of our time making our character grow stronger.

However, Allen’s guild was on another level. There were many players in his guild, including himself, who were premium members in the game. This meant that they had paid the monthly subscription to access locked features that considerably helped them get better loot and supply them with resources that assisted their character’s growth.

Me and Monster had always wanted to be one of those premium members and we had begged our parents to get it for us, but they would always refuse as they were concern that we would develop an addiction to the game.

Subsequently, after Allen had declared the PVP match with us, we were in a hurry to make our character stronger. That was when we found out how dark the internet was.

I remembered it was when me and Monster were walking about in the beginner town, Lombridge.

We had just logged in at that time and near a certain bridge, we spotted a player who was dancing about with a unique emote.

He was announcing to the players around him on a particular deal. The words typed out on top of his character’s head was a text that used glowing colors, “PM me If you want to become a member!”

God damn! What a fortune it was when we saw that. Could it be, that there was someone out there with such kind heart?

Needless to say, me and Monster was a gullible fool and quickly PMed (private messaged) him.

“Good sir! I’m interested in the offer.” Straight away I told Monster to type that message.

After getting a reply from us the player replied with, “Sure, just give me your password so I could transfer the membership for you.”

Being new to the internet me and Monster were like a fish swimming with sharks. We had never heard of the 101 basic rule, which was ‘Don’t tell anyone your passwords even to your family.’

Typing out both our account’s password with super-sonic speed to him privately we were excited to become premium members. After a while he told us to wait for a bit and told us to log off, he said that it would be done in thirty minutes.

We followed his orders and patiently waited until he was done. At that time me and Cloud were crazy excited to become members, we had already begun to plan ahead on what we should do when we log-in.

Later on, we logged in.

Our characters were in the bank.

All our money and items were gone.

We were naked and the sad part was we weren’t even members.

At first, we were confused but slowly we realized we were scammed.

On that day we swore to each other we would never tell anyone about this.

When the PVP battle came Allen and our guildmates were confused as to why our high leveled characters were using poor wooden equipment to battle, and shamelessly we told them that we had lost all our equipment during a fierce PVP battle in the wilderness.

Memory 015

When me and Monster were still new with the computer, we would usually only play flash games in the browser. We would never play anything else that requires the user to actually download the game onto the desktop. It was just far too confusing for our little minds to handle.

Well, when we got a bit older our friends had already evolved and started playing actual games for the PC, whilst we were still in the caveman era where we would still play flash games. It was then that we began to feel a bit embarrassed for not learning how to utilize the computer to the fullest.

So one time we decided to download a game from the internet that we found interesting. Acting like we knew what we were doing all we did was click download and when it was completed we just pressed next, next, next and checking the “I agree to the terms and conditions” box, with the final click in the button with the words ‘install’ in it.

Bam there you have it a game fully downloaded into the desktop with its icon displaying in the screen.

Proud of our achievement we double clicked the game, which I honestly don’t remember what it was, but I did know we never played it.

When we had clicked the game it was at that time the screen went full black. At that moment me and Monster panicked.

“What’s happening!?” Monster asked.

I was even more confused as he was so I couldn’t answer him and instead I quickly forcefully shut down the computer as I shouted out to Monster, “It must be a virus!”

Thankfully the computer responded to my action as it slowly shut down.

Sweating nervously me and Monster were afraid that we had broken the family computer. You could imagine us being so afraid of having both our parents finding out.

We had to fix it we thought, so we carefully turned the computer back on.

Slowly it started to turn on.

All the process and everything was all back to normal. There was still that game icon in the desktop but everything else was what you would normally see when you turn the computer on.

We had thought that we had saved our computer from the malicious virus before it had the chance to take over, and so with anger, we quickly uninstalled that game and erase it from the recycle bin.

With a sigh of relief, we looked at each other with a proud look on our face as if we had saved all of humanity.

Later on, we told this story to one of our friends but when he heard that instead of commending us for our valiant work he instead stared at us as if we were idiots. He told us, “Wasn’t that just the game going to full screen?”

At that time we refused to believe in his words and persuaded him that it was more likely a virus attack, but later when we got older and remembered this moment we realized that what he had assumed was probably right.

Having played only browser games and being relatively new with the computer, we didn’t actually know that games could actually go full-screen.