My first memory from Warcraft II is from when I was six or seven years old back in 95-96, my uncle was playing it and it was my real first contact with PC gaming. It was exciting as fuck, I was poking my nose and sucking my t-shirt and all kinds of groovy kid behaviour.
In 1999 I got my Internet connection and was looking into Kali since I read about it on Ont_LOKs Warcraft 2-sidao but decided to wait for WC2 Bnet Edition. The day it came, me and a couple of friends picked it up and created a new clan, YDN - You Die Now.
At the time there was a Swedish site called Warcraft SE where tournaments were held and I participated until I got banned because I was like 10 years old and aggressively politically correct spamming the WC SE boards about someone calling someone else a faggot.
Also in 1999 Warcraft 3 was announced and because I thought it would be fun to write at some kind of website, I lied to another Swedish WC site about being the neighbour of a Danish Blizzard employee and that I had inside information about pirates and zombies being new races in WC3.
In 2001, Warcraft SE was replaced with Warcraft Gamingeye and now I was good enough of a writer to join the crew. We had WC2 tournaments almost every week. During 1999-2003 I won exactly zero 1on1 games (I was close one time but the guy disconnected saying his mother had cancer), but I did create the famous b2b-low-Dock rush.
Also in 2001, my first column at WC Gamingeye was about how much I hate everything about the upcoming Warcraft 3 and that they should just revert all changes making it into a Warcraft 2,5 instead. People were raging except for the veteran WC2 players, obviously.
In 2002 I won my first Gamingeye tournament game. I was going to play my neighbour but since we shared IP no-one could host the game. He came over to my house, I picked scissor and he picked påse, then I took rock and the took scissor and it was all good.
In 2002 there was a Warcraft 2 LAN in Stockholm. I got there by train, playing and losing versus Iv@nhoe, Gambler_(DEA), Rat and Ont_LOK.
Around 2003 a lot of people stopped playing WC2 instead trying out WC3 and a year later WoW a.k.a. 3D-MSN Messenger made it even worse. But also at this point people in weird countries (Poland, Russia etc.) started to have a decent Internet connection. I even won a couple of games.
About this time I became basically the last person to host WC2 tournaments in Sweden (and maybe elsewhere since a lot of foreign players joined as well) and it felt like interest was dying and there was no indication of it coming back.
For several years I was collecting WC2-gifs, downloaded whole websites and stuff but when another preservation site came up I quit it, which I regret today. I have not played much since 2005 or 2006 but I still end up at forums like this or Axolotl's just to thrive in nostalgia. Gonna get myself some games on this server as well.
My Warcraft-special-thanks-list:
* Moreaulf for creating Warcraft SE and later Gamingeye.
* Ont_LOK for giving me early information throughout his site about WC2, spiking my interest.
* manzon and Iv@nhoe for creating hundreds of tournaments
* Tabac[Man] for giving me that 2on2 victory in 2000
* The American dude I played on New Years eve 1999-2000. No idea what his nickname was but he was very friendly.
* And of course all of the other old Swede's, Rat, Gambler, Ciatriz, Drunk[Man], Fiskpinnen and all of the ones I at the moment can not remember.
