The Dawggs

Plainly put, IP and I went on a recruiting binge. He would bring me the names of prospective clan members aka "Dawggs" and I had final say as to who would get in and who wouldn't. I wasn't too overly selective, we had a clan to build. I'd never done this before and there were no manuals on "clan-building" lying around. My pressing concern was to get Spam I Am and Sarge in the clan. They were each hesitant initially but both agreed to join us. I was thrilled. Now my new clan could take on anyone in a clan match and win. Awesome!

These are the names of the early Dawggs of GDawgg Clan: IP_Sitting_Down, GULL THE VIOLATOR, doc (later changed his name to WRATH), gorgon, Mad Hatter (gorgon's hockey-playing son), Spam I Am, Sarge, slash aka W/O Remorse, godwhisky, Kill Sport, Whole Lotta Holes (Holes for short), sil3ntninja, Big Mac Attack, Romello, Tarwn, FIREFOX71, FalconX, PuShAmAn=ud1*, deadami, X a Qshuner, TOI YA BAS (Scotland), Swiz, (Northern England), Enhanced, Desert Eagle, MaiM, Austin Powers, Rancid and Sidewinder.

The stories I could tell. Whew! We had a blast together. There was only one game worth playing back then as far as we knew and that game was Half-Life. Killbox was the only map we ever played. Endlessly. I set the time limit on all GDawgg Killbox servers to "0". For the uninitiated, that means there was no time limit. The map never rotated - lol. Players would regularly spend four or five hours at a time fragging in our servers, racking up scores well above 1000 kills for a given session.

The Dawggs of the GDawgg Clan were very close and we had some real characters in our midst. Most notably GULL. What a guy, what a guy. GULL was a crazy-awesome killbox player, very talented, extremely passionate about our clan and loyal like there's no tomorrow. He was pretty funny too. FIREFOX, aka Foxy was quite the character as well. However, I had a nemesis in my own clan. A guy who I targeted whenever we were in "the box" at the same time: doc. He and I must've spent thousands of hours fragging, blowing each other's brains out repeatedly then laughing about it. It didn't matter who else was playing, I was always trying to kill him first and foremost. Why? You might ask. We were both intensely competitive and somehow we both tried to prove it by killing each other more, most, early and often. He was simply the guy I had to kill, no matter what. The cool thing about it is we became very good friends. There was never any ill will between us, just great competition. I think the reason he called himself doc was because one of the stock Half-Life player models was Dr. Kleiner, a nuclear physicist. doc always used that model. Dr. Kleiner had a bald head and a lab-coat. Go figure. In September of 2003 doc changed his name to WRATH. I'm proud to say he's still a member of GDawgg Clan to this very day. He's seen the thick and the thin of it in our clan and he's never left. For that I'm truly grateful.

For every guy who has ever been in our clan I could tell four or five stories. Of course, there are some stories I simply cannot tell.


At the moment, there's just not enough time to recount all the events of our newly-formed clan that occurred between 2002 and 2004. But some of the names from the list above stand out: Tarwn: stone-cold .357 killer and the guy who re-coded our website for me in 2003. Tarwn is a skilled programmer. Kill Sport: killbox RPG camper. He was unapologetic about it too. We didn't mind though, he was one of us. sil3ntninja: graphic artist. Extremely talented and deadly in killbox. Ninja made numerous banners, logos, and flash images for our website. He made major design changes to GDawgg.com. Whole Lotta Holes: great guy, great player, great clan-mate. Holes is an experienced Unreal Tournament series mapper. Desert Eagle: deadly. Almost impossible to beat. Austin Powers: funny funny guy. Big Mac Attack: perhaps the most deadly Dawgg ever in Half-Life. Skill out of this world! He's no longer in our clan, yet he's still our friend and he still plays Half-Life killbox.

For my next blog post I'll talk about two very good friends who've been on this path with me since 2003: Swiz and MaiM...