In high school, someone brought in a burned Starsiege: Tribes CD-R into the computer lab and a few of us played it after class. I was instantly hooked, and after buying a CD-R off him for $2 I started playing at home every night.

Playing at home on 56k as a HPB I cut my teeth, and got into the scripts and decided to host all of the scripts I could on Planet Tribes on a site called Tribes Depot. Eventually we got up to ISDN 128K and I became an LBP, and I started doing a little bit of work on Planet Tribes as well. I would play primarily with friends from school, then started joining community servers and eventually found my way into a few clans. Tribes got me through a very heavy bout of depression in high school, as during a prolonged illness it was my only contact with the outside world and it was the only thing that kept me going.

This continued into college, with me going to a midnight release of Tribes 2 to get the game as soon as possible (unfortunately Unhandled Exception errors meant I didn’t get to play that night). Playing Tribes on a T1/T3 line was absolutely game-changing, and I probably played a few scrims. I even went back and bought a real copy of Starsiege: Tribes in a jewel case when I got Tribes: Aerial Assault for the PS2.

As T2 wore on, I somehow didn’t get that excited for Vengeance when it came out, and when Ascend came out I was super hyped but left quickly as I didn’t like the business decisions they were making. I migrated over to Team Fortress 2 and then World of Warcraft, and stoppedp laying Tribes.

But I would keep getting an itch for Tribes, and was disappointed that there wasn’t one. I found out that Starsiege: Raiders was a thing, then forgot about it, then when I found Starsiege: Deadzone was getting swapped with development for Tribes 3: Rivals the hype was back, stronger than ever.