A few days ago I met with my cousin who’s still in his early days at university. He’s a nice chap, socialize quite a lot, and it’s hard for anyone not to like him. We talked about a lot of things, and in the middle of it, the topic changed to FPS (First Person Shooter) games.

He mentioned a day when he played in a gamecenter, when suddenly others gathered around him in confusion. Somebody then commented, “Why the mouse movement is inverted? It’s very confusing”.
He had the “invert mouse” settings enabled. He started to observe the others, and realized, that today, nobody uses this setting.

We laughed until it hurts. Then I vaguely remember that when he’s much younger, I’ve sneaked them (him, his brother, my brother) to my office, and we played Quake I multiplayer together. It was a load of fun — and since I played it with “invert mouse” setting enabled, so did he. From then on, he played FPS games with the “invert mouse” setting enabled.

I commented about a game I found in their computer, I think it’s called True Crime. Tried to play it, but the game has no “invert mouse” setting. My aim was totally screwed up because of it. We laughed again.

The whole conversation reminded me about a proposal we made for Sampoerna. In 1999, the Indonesian Quake II community was approached by Indo-Ad about the possibility to do a multiplayer gaming competition for their client, Sampoerna. We gathered and quickly submitted a proposal. I was not able to further followed it up because I already moved abroad, but I think the plan didn’t go forward.
Before that, I was also approached by Indosat on the possibility to create online game community and events. I have had meetings with their contact person, but then I had to move to United Kingdom, and the talks stopped.

I took a quick look around my backup – and turned out that I still got that proposal for Sampoerna. So [ here it is ] for your enjoyment, a blast from the past.