Remembering My First Online Kill - Sabotage Times

Remembering My First Online Kill

First kiss, first alcoholic drink and losing your virginity are all milestone events for teenagers, but for a hardcore gamer they don't come close to that first online kill...
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First kiss, first alcoholic drink and losing your virginity are all milestone events for teenagers, but for a hardcore gamer they don't come close to that first online kill...

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“My team had been tasked to destroy and anti-aircraft gun in the French small town of Carentan. We were trying to help the forces at Utah and Omaha beach shore up their position and start a defensive line against German counterattacks. “

Every hardcore gamer remembers their first online kill.

It was was 2005 and I was 14 years old playing the original Call Of Duty on the PC online one Sunday evening. The house was still on dial up and I can clearly remember my mum telling me to get off the computer so she could use the phone. 

 “The Germans were trying to hold the city long enough to allow reinforcements en route from the south to arrive. I was a young private in the 101st Airborne and very green.” 

REALLY GREEN. My previous half dozen attempts at online shooters involved me running around aimlessly only to get sniped from a distance. I had dabbled with running about with a grenade with the pin pulled and turning myself into a kamikaze bomber, but to no avail. My attempts to go big and fire the Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon only ended up with me blowing myself up.

“It was a hazy summer evening and I remember crouching on the second floor of a destroyed country house when I noticed a man running across the street. He didn’t look familiar so I raised my M1 carbine, took aim down the iron sights and fired four or five times and shot him dead.”

At the bottom left of my computer monitor, I saw “10+ Allies”.

Every hardcore gamer remembers their first online kill.

The first online kill is a rite of passage that can bring out all sorts of misty eyed stories from your gamer friends. Sprinting round a door and crouching in the corner to fire someone chasing you. Hiding under a train so you snipe at the knees of your unsuspecting victim. Or the greatest of all, equipping a grenade, looking as high into the sky as you can and throwing it halfway across the map in some sort of twisted Hail Mary pass.

When most novices go online they’re killed again and again by more experience players. They have shinier guns, better outfits, know all the nooks and crannies of each map and just “get” the game more. But you get better. You study the maps, you learn what guns work best in what situations, you learn when you hide and went to chase after the enemy. In the end, I don’t think I put as much time towards something that only lasted a few seconds of joy that that online kill brought me, other than the time I lost my virginity.

But that happened the following year, and that’s another story....

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