Clan Dragon

Just a little insight into my past… in case I someday forget.

Many years ago, soon after the release of StarCraft, I downloaded the StarCraft demo. I would estimate this to be in roughly 1997, give or take two years. I don’t know exactly how I met them, but I stumbled upon a Pokemon clan (or online community) known as Clan DRGN. They had already existed for a while, and I was joining them just as they were beginning to get over the Pokemon fad. But Starcraft was in. With the demo, one can play multiplayer on Battle.net. The demo’s limitation is that players could only be the Terran race, not Zerg or Protoss. Quite honestly, I sucked at the game. But I learned the logic of it, and my online friends taught me how to play. I felt a great sense of meaning and pride. It was strange that I had many more online friends than friends in real life. I guess this was back while I was in elementary school. My social life during those years is another story.

Soon after getting into the Starcraft demo, Starcraft Broodwar was released. I had bought Starcraft original off eBay for roughly $20, but even to this day I do not own a copy of Broodwar. I remember getting a copy of the CD from my friend Max, and I remember how the copy couldn’t play on Battle.net. So I turned to bnet alternatives, such as FSGS (free standard gaming server, I believe) and others. These didn’t check the CD key, so I was free to play online. During this time, I learned to mess with proxies and IP addresses, internet servers and the Windows registry.

With Starcraft game I bought from eBay, I could play on Battle.net for real and completely legally. Things are a little jumbled in my mind, but I hope that by writing them down, they’ll become more clear. Clan DRGN went through several phases in leadership. Membership increased and dropped. At its height I saw probably 25 members. Today I know only about 5 people who even remember anything of Clan Dragon. I remember that as DRGN members turned to other games, especially Counter-Strike, I didn’t follow. However, with Diablo II, I did. In fact, Clan Dragon is the reason I have Diablo II and its expansion, and the original reason I ever played the game.

In the year 2000 they reorganized to form Dragonz 2k or Dragonz 2000. This never took off. I blame some of this on myself. Back then, my web design skills, quite honestly, sucked. I was using FrontPage Express and Microsoft Publisher/Paint for graphics. I knew only a smidge of HTML. I couldn’t get things organized and I wasn’t much of a leader. But it gave me a lot of experience that the vast majority of people do not have. Considering that this was at least 4 years ago, I was about 12 years old at the time. I was using FTP and working with tables and JavaScript. Interesting, but nothing amazing.