It's been so long since I've done or considered anything HL- or TFC-related... I visited this site many many many months ago and I am still pretty excited about having something like this in HL2. But aside from that, my life has been anywhere but online gaming.
I saw this thread and I figured that I should give a shout to some of the people that I recognize from the prehistoric times: masterMAN, pud, Repair Man, What_the_Hell, and, of course, the 404 guys.
My beginning in TFC was fairly humble and unspectacular. I picked up a copy of HL in 1999 when my friend suggested that I try it out. Playing it on my computer (a Pentium 200, at the time) was very painful, but the single player still managed to completely overwhelmed me. I tried the multi-player (on one of the worst 56k connections known to man), but that never really captivated me.
I downloaded and installed TFC rather randomly one day and started goofing around. My first class was sniper and I was fairly good considering my HPBness (oh how I miss the old netcode). I pubbed quite a bit with the guys from [WTC], many of whom ended up in [SOL] - Scream Out Loud. Fast forward a little bit and I was recruited into my first real clan: [POW] - Prisoners of War. That eventually morphed into [Fe] - Full Eclipse.
My first 'big' clan, at least one that people would remember, was [LfA] - Lust for Armageddon, which I joined in 2000. I still remember that OGL title match against [ELB] - Elite Loser Boys where we won, but then Makyla (who we affectionately remember as Pakyla) got caught cheating.
I started taking over leadership as he left and we became good friends with our rival, |RE| - Rogue Element. They always used to kill us, but that started to change as we became more disciplined. By this time, I settled in as the Engineer and, when necessary, Soldier and HWGuy.
I left [LfA] shortly before they disbanded in 2001 and joined |SD| - San Dawgs. I found a real community in |SD| and it became my niche in TFC. It was with |SD| that I first started to play against the big names - 404, TDA, PF, bP, CSI, and so on - and claim a title. But that ride was fairly short as a new breed of clans with a high concentration of talent started to come forward. Interest started to fade, and |SD| died early in 2002.
I took some time off from TFC, and I made an effort to avoid top-tier competition. That all changed when PF. - Pyroclastic Flow came back again (for the third time, if I remember correctly). I also stayed with PF until the very end, which was also the end of my TFC life.
I was really, really excited when HL2 came out and rumours started to fly about a version of TFC getting ported over. I await the realization of this with bated breath
