Mike Nike
Whiplash expects a huge story here...and im thinking about it, even i probably should repair my pc first in order to get some data back out of my +-3 huge data crashs/losses.
After reading the "About" of iBlaze² and Whiplash, i just go ahead and tell a few things to start with..
Personal
1984: born in Germany, Bergisch Gladbach (close to Cologne)
1986: already good in math for my young age, it seemed :D
1990: Germany wins the soccer world championship, Cologne has a good soccer team -> probably influencing me to fall more in love with numbers and statistics -> probably one reason why falling in love with records as well. But that might have been influenced more by getting my first PC and Nintendo (NES) as well. From that point on, i've probably enjoyed video games all day, unless i was playing soccer with friends or in my local soccer team, where i ended up as the more responsible defender guy and later 1 year as captain (in my 12th of 13 soccer team years) - only made it to the edge though of getting to the pre selection for the german national team. Unfortunately probably sitting 8 hours daily with no good sitting position at the PC made my back hurt so much, my doctors told me i'm invalid to play in a soccer team - i kept on playing for 2 years, but had to stop then. Anyway, virtual adventures, including a lot of time playing GP2 for example, have been a great time :)
Aged 6, i invented the name "Mike Nike Inc.". Mike as a shortcut for my real prename, Nike (not knowing the shoes) as rhyme of Mike, N being 1 latter after the M in the alphabet. Playing Snake Rattle 'n' Roll (lovely 1st level music!), which included something with "Incredible" in the game at some point and the business simulation Dynatech, including a couple of names ending with "Inc.", i found my business name in order to crush the ingame highscore, playing with my cousin and uncle.
1994: i can't remember for sure if i was 10 or already older, when i started with coding. Nevertheless, it's been a mix of text adventures and comics, i did with all the useful ascii chars in the MS-Dos Editor, which took me 200 hours in total, instead of doing boring homework ;)
1997: +-1 year, i had quite fun dodging the boring german and french lessons in school by creating over 100 little comics/stories in form of small looking books, including usually flat jokes or insider and at least some funny art on the cover. Don't know if i was 12 or 14 or so, but when discovering Quick Basic, my MNI IP&I (insider productions & introductions) gone virtual, including a pallette of quite some genres, including a racing game as well ;)
It was probably also around that time, i had more opportunities to drive some real go-cart. Mixed with having fun watching F1, cheering for M.Schumacher, i ended up driving pretty well.
On Michaels Kart Center in Kerpen, i also managed to drive a lot of daily records, setting the best laptime of all visitors of that day. I always hated the grip problem though - that's why i love the AntiSlider so much, even though the part sucks a bit sometimes, where you have to slidebrake with it, in order to beat a laprecord.
1999: this year or maybe it was 1997 i discovered Borland Delphi 4 and had a nice time developing some tools. Games: yes, but just a few lame ones. Most of my tools for TurboSliders i later wrote in it, such as the CarCreator or the ServerAdminTool, which was useful to punish the riQ's out there, driving backwards in servers, by autokicking players with IPs on the IP ban list.
2001: discovering Blitz Basic opened up a whole new world for me. New PC games (many genres again, including a few car racing games, including one with AI).
2004: 11th march, apparently a date in the year, which combines so many different events in my life, that i can't name them all out of my head. Anyway, it's been 2 days after the first ghost version of Sliders has been published, i think. And the Terra Servers, i think, already had a ghost server running. The day, i downloaded Turbo Sliders, basicly became the day, i somewhat stopped programming. Because i always mainly programmed to create a kart racing game, including a kart with no grip loss. I mainly found that in the AntiSlider, so: it felt like there is no need to create something, which is mostly already there..
TurboSliders
2004: from the scratch on, if i remember it right, i drove my first laprecords on the very first day. I don't know out of my head, how many laps i drove local, before playing online the first time, but probably i didn't drive any. The first online cups, 30 tracks, i probably used to be placed around place 3 or so, out of +-10, i gotta check that. Luckily i created a tool "LogFileCopy" or something, which saved the log.txt from being overwritten. But i lost a lot in a pc crash ;(...and there are only some logfiles and screenshots remaining. Anyway, as Z, i think it was, said: i was the first major record hunter in Turbo Sliders. Which might be somewhat right, perhaps, because i was really into laprecordhunting from my very beginning. But looking at some records (especially with Slider) of the super veterans, like Ande, Eppu, RJ & Co., who played TS in 2003 from the very beginning, i wouldn't mind giving that "title" to one of them.
The enthusiasm i had at TS 0.86 was probably the highest in my TS career and giving new players the chance to enjoy TS in similar ways, will probably keep me in the scene for quite some time - if it's not the wonderful game itself, which will keep me anyway, as i predicted at my first TS days, i think.
Back then, the big names of Sliders were TuT | Tuukka (beating me, lucky xzeal and unlucky Tijny in that old knockout cup), Slitec BL4CK and Slitec swos and xS was the challenging team in the tough fight vs the 3 pros from the Slitec team.
Soon though, i was hunting a lot of laprecords, especially with EasySlider and later also with AntiSlider, before i flooded the official record lists with Slider as well. Especially enjoyable were the RDP-Cups on Terra Servers, which took 1 lap and especially my edge with the sometimes randomly selected Slider was ridiculously high. But i don't remember if these cup took place in 2004 and or 2005 and or 2006 and/or even later.
Anyway, backward drivers in the terra servers ruined our races back then, and nonghost racing became a bit of a pity sometimes. Players like riQ (a smart version of REIROM, if you want so), were seeing rough racing and backward driving as fun or partly also as part of the game, even the serveradmins were not tolerating it and kicked/banned him often enough. Funnily, even Tijny, known as teammember of SH Sebas or so, were somehow appearing in my early days as one of the guys, who were partly driving backwards. Sebas was the rougher one and Tijny probably just had few less races or maybe even just lags, where it looked like he was not "on the good side". Anyway, facing the "dark side", having a little "good vs evil" fight inspiration probably gave me a slight additional motivation to keep flooding the recordlists with new antislider/easlyslider/slider and sometimes even speeder records. But Tijny, as he is, kept flooding back and beating laptimes with partly ridiculous huge soul destroying gaps^^. Okay, i exaggerated there :D, not soul destroying, but definately worth an "oh shit! he beat my yammy [insert a random track name here] record!" or something similar. Unfortunately, he also needed in average less amount of laps in order to beat my laprecords compared to the amount of laps i needed to beat his ones. Anyway, that "cold war" :D kinda had some nice psychologic parts in it^^ and i wanna thank Tijny for keeping it up and also thanks to those, who joined the challenge here and there, such as Matti, Janne and the one who actually kinda replaced me in the fight against the number 1: dede - who actually became Tijny so close in skill, it's probably better to say he is the 2nd number 1 in Sliders, than to say he is all around just number 2 in an imaginary alltime TS ranking. But that's just a personal ranking..
2005-2015: what? 1 year and now summing up 11 years? Well, that's a bit how i feel it: the main time of TurboSliders was probably in 2004 and a bit in 2005-2006 with the +- 1.0.5 version around, when the activity once were a bit high again. I can't really say which cups took place in which year ...out of my head. Anyway, the cups i most enjoyed, were the ghostracing ones, i think... - especially combined with hunting the fastest laps ;)
Being able to win the first 3 DITs were a pleasure and lately having fun at the weekly record server, were letting me enjoy some nice afternoons/nights as well, even it once took me probably something like 8 hours to drive a Spinner record, which Tijny probably could beat again within 30 minutes :E
Unfortunately there haven't been as many official record hunts and cups supporting the fastest lap, as i wished, in those years - so i even skipped a bunch of those nonghost cups, which had a bit of a leak in fairplay issues, supporting rough racers a bit over gentlemen drivers.
Teams:
2004 xS
20?? x (see, 2005-2015 feels so much like "some time after 2004", i dont even know when i joined [x])
Organized Cups:
2005 ?+-1 year: Xmas Demo Cup or so - i never really wanted to organize cups by myself. If i had a server, it was usually not so good and also i did not want to have such a high advantage, playing on my server. I would feel like i have to win and it would not mean anything. But if i don't win, it would be a shame. So i ate what's on the plate and joined the cups other people organized.
I eventually hosted a bunch of unofficial cups and even at least 1 official one - at least one of them (a punaball cup) i didn't with too much effort though, probably because unusual for me, i cared pretty low for my result in it and just wanted to give the punaball lovers something enjoyable.
Mods:
Enojyed a lot of them :D
PB: Still jealous of Punatiainen, him being the first one to build a soccer track in combination with a playable ball :D. Anyway, while being more of a top player in the early days, mirror matching Badeend and able to frequently hit tough shots the way i wanted, the new version of PB somehow doesn't allow those shots anymore in many cases and the ball results into weird collisions. Also, the PB pros, like Tijny & Fama kept on working on the tough and fast ways to make goals, creating a huge skill edge over those who only play occasionly.
XB: After Newton and me had couple ideas for new mods, Kobradog came out with a version of what we were talking about and had quite success with it.
Being good in avoiding to get hit, i used to be the best in the early days of X-Bumpz at the X-Bowl. The original version of it unfortunately got soon kinda outdated though, when a new ts version supported dead terrain and cups were organized with xb-fun-tracks in mostly non original ways (not (many of) the x bowl tracks..i think), combined with non original points systems supporting points for wrecks.
Tracks:
Kinda never really published them - probably because i am very lazy there and have more track and mod ideas than actually building tracks.
Still waiting for that american gladiators/maze kinda track/mod to be built by someone.
Records:
Once in the forum i think i counted some (how i like calling them:) world and server records, probably resulting in +-3000. Certainly though, just a bunch of them might be so sick, they result into quick abort of tries, when even one of the super pros try to hunt them.
Races/Cups:
Don't know right now, which races or cups i won (or not won) were my best performances. Anyway, i actually don't feel like i ever really showed a real disappointing performance, giving the circumstances. Except maybe once, when i got early out in a knockout tournament, where the last place loses a life and i felt like i could get average maybe 2nd place in that tourney.
Tools:
Don't know how many i made and how many unfinished projects and ideas on paper i have, but i'm thankful for all those, who were not lazy, when i was. Especially Tijny did some good work.
What else?
I was gonna tell more out of my head, but some Skype messages are putting me out of concept right now :D...so...this has an end right now, but i might talk a little more later on in order to help Whiplash get his "TS history puzzle" a bit more complete.