Some great stories here, both long and short.
I guess I want to contribute to it with my own humble story.
Maybe I can't say that Battletech has changed my life completely, but influenced it enough and took a significant part of my younger life.
I grew up in one of the largest cities in Ukraine, and by the way, it is on the Inner Sphere map too, deep in Kuritan space there is a planet Dnepropetrovsk. I guess this revelation and some 8 years dedicated to studyng Japanese language, decided my BT allegiance.
I hadn't had a computer at home until I went to university, but my sister's husband had one, and I was a regular guest at their's as a kid. One day he showed me a new game on his hard drive, called MechWarrior. 'Mech' (with 'ch' pronounced like in 'chain') in Russian is a word for 'Sword', but the game surprisingly appeared to be not about swords at all. You know what it was. But I was too young to be fascinated by the merc unit management and mech customization, it seemed too complex to me, and the sim part was slow and pretty abstract on a small monitor, though I enjoyed the mechlab pictures. Soon I forgot about it. Until in a couple years we've got a CD with Mechwarrior 2: 31 Century Combat. The picture on the box was fantastic, we ran the game and the intro cinematic started. It seems so simple now, but back then I was speechless - the dark atmosphere and a whirl of emotions and death, that played in a less than a minute, overwhelmed me. It was also the first time for me when it wasn't just some 16-bit music playing from PC, it sounded like a movie. The very notion of giant battle machines hadn't been in my mind before, and at that moment my imagination got a new direction to develop. But after the intro the game didn't ran. There was some error, or the PC wasn't good enough.. So I was just reloading the intro time after time, and when I got home, I started drawing the Timber Wolf and Summoner, though I didn't know their names, and some other mechs of my own. Later, I told my friend about MechWarrior, and even managed to show him that intro, which got him fascinated no less. At that moment we were already Battletech fans.
And it developed soon, for the PC was upgraded and MW2 launched. I quickly grasped what all was about in the game, and shared all setting details with my friend. Funny thing, I played the game and liked it very much, but it was not the game itself that fascinated me, it was the atmosphere of the world of the stompy mechs. My access to the PC was very limited, and it took me much time to get into all peculiarities of Mechlab and start to fight smart and use weapons as proper, not just blindly chain-firing all the loadout. But most of the time the game was far beyond our reach, so we were listening to the cassette with the soundtrack of the game (including the intro), imagining our own battles and drawing BT mechs and creating our own. About that time we saw the BT books on sale and plunged into the R. Thurston's trilogy and into the Gray Death Legion saga, the latter unspeakably perverted by the Russian translation. Oh gods, if only W.Jr.Keith knew...
By that time we were already through obsession with the world of Dune 2 and have had created two table-top versions of that game for our computer-less crowd. Now we felt it is time to make a table-top game about mechs. We hadn't even the slightest idea that such game had existed for more than 10 years back then, and that our beloved MechWarrior started from it. So we took our own table-top system from Dune and worked to upgrade the rules once more. Our maps were drawn on large whatman paper lined in squares, not hexes, mechs were drawn top-down on the cardboard and glued to the pieces of thick rubber. The weapons' damage numbers were approximate to what we felt, resulting in many hilarious moments while playtesting, with the following adjustment. Mechs had different speed and set of weapons, but some general amount of HP instead of sections with separate armor values and internal structure. Still, there were levels of damage taken on which some systems or weapons were 'destroyed'. And there were some modifiers to movement and shooting. Mechs, tanks and infantry were half BT, half our own.
About the time MW3 arrived, we had more access to computers, thanks to many 'computer clubs'. We had fiercest multiplayer clashes in Quake and other games, but somehow not MechWarrior. There were not enough fans around. But we played single-player campaign a lot. Around the year 1999 I've found a guy who owned MechWarrior2: Mercenaries, and I bought it from him and oh, how good it was! Even after MW3 graphics, Mercenaries were the best for me. That was the time when I truly understood I'm no Clanner, I belong to Inner Sphere.
We created another version of our table-top, making the rules more complex, remaking mech chips and map, which became even larger. We even had a rulebook with illustration for each mech. Even though it was lots of fun, we had only several sessions with it, as it could easily take up a day to play a good battle with about 12 mechs from each side.
MW4 was some fun too, but it felt different, not exactly right. Still, it featured another impressive intro (all MW games always had great intros, MWO sucks for breaking the tradition) and in MW4:Mercenaries they tried to make a bleak shadow of MW2:Mercenaries's management. But thanks to them for Solaris.
Around that time I happened to find a hobby store in my city and there I saw it for the first time - table-top Battletech starter box. I couldn't believe my eyes. They let me open the box and look inside, I was kind of out of my mind. I had to know everything about it. But at that time I couldn't afford to buy it. I even asked some friends to participate, but they weren't as eager as I was.
Instead, I ran into a guy who was a big fan of BT too, and he introduced me to MegaMek, which is a computer version of BT TT. He also knew some more fans around and we have formed a crowd of about 15 people, gathering each week-end to play MechWarrior RPG and fighting our battles in MegaMek. At that time I already had a computer with dial-up internet, and I had free internet access from 1AM to 7AM. My classes in university started at 8AM, so every day I went to bed around 10PM, woke up at 1AM, connected to internet and played MegaMek Net till 4-5AM, then went to bed again for a couple of hours or less. In this way I learned everything about TT and leveled up my English a good bit =)
Armed with the new TT knowledge, we planned to make a new iteration of our own TT, this time fully within our own universe, with our own environment, mechs, weapons, systems and other stuff, adopting the best ideas from various TTs and computer games. But it wasn't the best time already.. everyone including me was too busy with colleges, or work, or both.
Later I moved to Kiev, were I managed to find some local fans. We played MW RPG, fighting battles in real TT with minis, I even acted as a GM for a while. But then I've got the chance to go to Japan for study, and when I was back, the crowd was no more, and BT has ended for me until MWO. I couldn't even play MMNet, as it takes more time than I could afford.
So, can I say BT changed my life? I don't know. But it surely gave me lots of great communication and good fun, it encouraged my creativity and spurred my imagination.
P.S. What I forgot to mention, is that my books of the infamous Russian edition of the William Jr. Keith's novels are all heavily marked through with pencil on every single page, showing story inconsistencies, lore inconsistencies, bad math, horrible implications, lame translation, awful style and what not. And I must say it was so much fun! These books were re-read tens of times with pencil in hand, and not having original text, we used to blame all this horror on mr. Keith himself. But the true revelation was to finally get the original books in English after all these years. Then it became obvious that only a minor part of inconsistencies and lore bending can be blamed on the author. Actually, 'Operation Excalibur' made us think it's written by an utter madman who forgot anything he ever knew about Battletech, moreover, a deem redneck madman. Turns out, Russian 'Operation Excalibur' is even 30% larger than the original and these 30% are entirely the translator's imagination, as well as redneck style, and it bends the story and the characters pretty heavily. Other books are warped less, but still enough. When I desperately need a good laugh, I open any of these books randomly and read the comments. But that's a story for another time.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Edited by Duncan Jr Fischer, 13 November 2014 - 03:26 AM.
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