Sometimes I get sudden reminders just how small the gaming world really is. Occassionally I’ll stumble across EverQuest guildies from 18 years ago in modern games like Guild Wars 2, I’ll find out I was in the same Tribes clan in 1999 with certain Qt3 members almost 2 decades after the fact, and many other instances of happenstance. Some people just keep showing up again and again.
Usually I happen to cross paths with people or guilds I’ve known over the years by just sticking with the same genres year after year as we all get funnelled from one big title to the rest. But sometimes memorable individuals will show up in the strangest places.
The reason this comes to mind for me today is because an old ghost from my newsgroup days on comp.sys.* reared his head in the middle of a Youtube video from one of my current favorite gaming channels. Sure, this same guy, and a lot more of us here on Qt3, were all interacting 20+ years ago in newsgroups, but typically none of us are just randomly showing up in unexpected places (save for occasional game credits).
Anyway, these guys ended up talking about a bunch of @dsmart Tweets near the end of this video (relating to the Epic Megastore) and I was just reminded again that I’m never really that isolated online.