My dear daughter,
Now, computer RPG games are really something.
I must have started with Hugo 2 on our 486 DX2 – 66 MHz, but after that I played older games like NetHack and Aklabeth.
Then I spent hundreds and even thousands of hours playing Eye of The Beholder III, the Aethra Chronicles demo, Baldur’s Gate, Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal, Planescape: Torment, Knights of The Old Republic 1 and 2, the entire Ultima series, mostly Ultimas IV, VI, VII, VIII – Pagan and IX, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3, Shadowrun Returns, Fallout 1, 2, 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 and many others.
I have wasted a great deal of lifetime on the Baldur’s Gate and Ultima series. Mostly Ultimas VIII and IX. The series is the product of the genius of Mr. Richard Garriott. He handcrafted the first games and gave birth to modern PC gaming.
Baldur’s Gate is probably the best computer game ever. I was playing the most recent game in the series (Siege of Dragonspear, 2016) in the hospital while I waited for your mother to return from the surgery to unblock her Fallopian tubes, which made it possible for her to become pregnant. I remember sleeping in the bathroom during my internship days and getting work overdue because I had spent the night playing Baldur’s Gate.
Marcelo introduced me to Ultima VIII, and it captured me viscerally. At one point I knew all the character lines in the game by heart.
Then in 2004 they released Ragnarok Online in Brazil, and things were never the same again.
It was the first MMORPG to be officially released in Brazil. Many Brazilian players already had experience with Ultima Online and EverQuest, but they had to connect to a foreign service to play.
Ragnarok was a stupid game, vaguely based on the Secret of Mana from the SNES (that one is a good game). Ragnarok later came to be known as a Korean grindfest. You just aimlessly and brainlessly killed hordes of enemies in hopes they would drop rare items, and that was all it took to turn hundreds of thousands of Brazilian players into zombies.
I must have played it heavily for about 2 years. I got home from college or internship and went directly to play Ragnarok. I introduced Marcelo to it and he was also instantaneously hooked.
The graphics were very poor and, as I said, generally the game was pretty stupid, so we soon started to experiment with pirate servers of the next big thing we had already heard so much about: World of Warcraft.
Love,
Dad
Aspergers Dad 