A Name to Play By

That is me in the back. None of us had a name yet.

It all goes back to the late nineties. Before I had a name I played under at all, there was a computer lab full of friends.

I was playing PC games at school with the guys I had class with. Dave, who co-founded this site with me, Phillip, a handful of others. We played in the lab, we played at home, and for a while none of us really had a gamer name. I am not sure most people thought about it that way yet. That came with multiplayer.

By 1999, Dave and I had already started POCG, but I still did not have a real handle. Then one afternoon a few of us were crammed into the computer lab playing Midtown Madness. The way I drove is what did it. I tore around the city sideswiping traffic and aiming for any gap I could find, and the pedestrians in that game would scream it right at me. You maniac. My friends heard the game say it, looked over, and started saying it too.

There were no gamertags then, not the way we mean now. No Xbox Live, nothing like that on consoles. But online, I became Maniac. On forums, on BBSes, signing on, that was me. We had already started POCG, and SegaPost before it, and the name moved straight onto the site. It became my email address. It was my callsign. It was who I was.

That is what this series is about. Callsign is about the gamer: who they are, what they became, the identity they built. The names, but also everything the names attached to. LAN parties, clans, guilds, alliances, corporations, all the groups we poured ourselves into until they became part of who we were. It is a recurring series about our identities. Where you got your name. Why you called your clan what you called it and what it meant to you. Why we get so attached to a name, and to a game, and to the people we met through both. I want to pull all of that apart over time. This is just the first one.

A handle is not a username

Let me start with something simple that trips people up. What is the difference between a handle, a gamertag, a clan tag, and a username?

A username is the least of these. A username is whatever was still available. You might not be Maniac on Blizzard’s site, or in your email, or when you log into your bank, so you become some other thing with a couple of numbers on the end. That is a username. It is not who you are. It is just the key that fits the lock.

A handle, or a gamertag, is different. That is who you have become, or who you want to be. That is your persona. For me, a username might be something like Adam Rich. But my gamertag, for years, was Maniac, because that is who I was inside a game. That was the character. I would run and gun. I tank rushed the base. In a sports game I went for it on fourth down and make everyone mad. A gamertag is who you are personifying when you play. It may not be who you are in real life. It is who you become.

Given, or chosen

Here is the part I find most interesting, and it is the thread I want to keep pulling through this whole series. Was your name given to you, or did you choose it?

There are names you pick for yourself. And there are names other people put on you. I did not pick Maniac. Maniac was put on me, because that is how I played. My friends gave it to me, Dave and Phillip and the others. I would probably never have chosen it on my own.

And that name is the one that made POCG. The Maniac voice, the way our earliest reviews and news are written, that is Maniac. Even my teachers, in high school and in college, told me I wrote in a solid stream of consciousness, no breaks, whatever came out of my head went straight onto the page. I was a little crazy with it. You can still read it in those early pieces, and honestly it still shapes how I write now. A name my friends gave me as a joke became the voice of the site. That is the power of a callsign you did not choose.

The whole chain

For everything else, though, I picked my own names, and looking back they are a map of who I was at the time.

The first one came before Maniac. My very first handle was Herbio. My grandfather was a pastor named Herb, and a lot of kids at school knew him, so they called me Little Herb. When I needed a name for myself online, Herbio is what I came up with. It was the only thing I could think of when I was sitting there trying to sound cool and landing somewhere short of it. But it was mine. That was my tag in the very first days of my GeoCities page, over in the Area 51 neighborhood, where our first site lived. Maniac came later, in 1999, handed to me by a game and my friends.

Then in 1999, Asheron’s Call came out, and that changed how I thought about all of this. It was the first real MMORPG I ever played. There were not many before it. You had Ultima, you had EverQuest, but Asheron’s Call was mine, and I was in the beta as a tester. For the first time I had to create a character, and that character was going to be me. And I had no idea what to call myself. I tried Maniac. Taken. I tried Herbio. Taken too. That is a whole subject on its own, the people who already have your name. There are a lot of Maniacs out there.

So I sat there stuck. The only thing in my head was lunch. We had gone out that day and I had soft tacos at a Mexican place. And that is how a character named Gracious Tortillas came into the world. It made no sense at all, and it did not last. The minute the beta ended and the real game went live, I picked something I would actually keep.

That name was Dans L’Amour. It means, more or less, in love. I picked it because I had been talking to someone in the game, which is a whole other story for another time. I used it for a few years, mostly in that one game and one other. I was not playing a ton of online games with a public handle back then. On the site and in the forums I was still Maniac.

Then I grew up. I was a teenager when this site started, a teenager making up these characters. In the early 2000s I became an adult, and as an adult you make different choices. I decided it was time for a new persona. Something that was going to be me for the long haul. I created Arcus Maximus.

From 2005, for the next twenty years, that was who I was. If you saw Arcus Maximus in World of Warcraft, or EVE Online, or Asheron’s Call, or on Steam, that was me. I chose it on purpose. I love playing an archer, so I went looking for the right name for one, and I went at it literally. In Latin, arcus is the bow and maximus is the greatest. Arcus Maximus. The greatest bow. I was proud of that one.

Fire Breathing Buddy

But last year I had been feeling, for a while really, that I was past Arcus Maximus. I kept asking myself whether I should still be him. I did not have an answer. So much of my stuff is still tied to that name, the email addresses, Discord, all of it. But the truth was that most of the friends I made in those games and those years are gone. Friendships faded, games went offline, people drifted and moved away. I sat with that and felt like I needed a fresh start.

So I got a new name. And like Maniac, I did not choose it. Someone gave it to me. When I told my wife, she laughed and said, that is you, that has to be your new handle.

I became Fire Breathing Buddy.

You do you

My story is not everybody’s. Some gamers find one tag and stay with it forever. You might be Crash Override, or xXDeathKiller514Xx, tagged for life, and that is fine. You do you.

Take my buddy Dave, who helped me start this site. Back when we were playing all those games, when I was Maniac, he was TheSaint. I do not know if he picked it to balance out my craziness with a little sainthood, or if there was another reason entirely. I have honestly never asked him, and I should. These days Dave goes by MagicDave. We almost never end up where we started. It is an evolution, the names and the people and the games all changing into the next thing.

So why do we change them at all? Early on it was simple availability. Maniac is common, and the names I wanted were taken. And looking back, some of it I am glad to have left behind. At one point my email was maniac_pocg@hotmail.com. At another it was maniac1@aol.com. That is the kind of address you do not want to hand to a client, or to family, but there it was, announcing Maniac to everyone I wrote to. Cringe and all, it was still who I was at the time. Who I had become.

What was your first handle?

So here is my question for you. What was your first handle? And would you still use it? Or are you like me, where you have moved on and built something new, more than once?

There is something funny in my own arc. For a long time I wanted to be more refined than Maniac, something with a bit more dignity to it. And now I am Fire Breathing Buddy, which, when you say it out loud, is not really a step toward dignity at all.

If you are still flying your old handle, do you like it? Have you ever thought about a new one? And if you moved on, what pushed you? Tell me. We have a forum here on POCG, so leave a message, or send me an email, or fill out a comment. Whatever works for you. Tell me your name, and where it came from.

This is just the start of the series. We are going to get into clan tags, into the groups we built and why we named them the way we did. I have a piece coming on LAN parties, because I am actually heading to one soon, and there will be a full write up on that and how it all ties back to this. So tune back in. We are only getting started.