The Old Days
Back in the early 2000s, LGUT was home. Low Grav UT was Unreal Tournament 2003 with the gravity turned way down, and T-Bone ran it out of the lowgravut.com forum. Later, T-Bone, me and a handful of others reformed as the clan XMCombat.
What kept us coming back was good people, good games and... T-Bone's ProZoom Instagib. You could fire an energy ball, then shoot it and blow it up. Add low gravity and you had players floating all over the map, with Worm hitting every one of them. Worm got accused of aimbotting constantly. He wasn't cheating. He was just that good. And somewhere in the middle of every match, Matt was yelling "Going Red!" or "Going Blue!" like the rest of us needed the play-by-play. When we weren't fragging in UT, we were usually running Raven Shield together.
We ran one of the most popular servers around, and we kept it clean. No racism, no misogyny, no griefing. Break the rules and you got kicked or banned. One guy I banned took his appeal to our vBulletin forum. He didn't write an apology. He posted the lyrics to "The Reason" by Hoobastank, and they made a pretty solid apology. I unbanned him, and he behaved himself from then on.
Keeping it clean took a lot of work. Toward the end, Flint350 was carrying way too much of the admin load, and between that and the cheaters it started to feel like a job. Then life happened. Kids, careers, all of it. Nobody quit on purpose. We just drifted, and one day the server went quiet.
I was in my mid to late 20s back then. I'm 53 now. The other night it hit me how much fun all of that was, so I found a download, got back on, and thought, I've got to try to find the old crew.
If you were one of us, Flint350, Ghost, Matt, Sweetness, T-Bone, Worm, or anyone else who wore the [XMC] tag or played on our server, the door is open. Come find us on Discord.
[XMC]Hudson