I REMEMBER… HAZED’S FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH FED
by Hazed
As I write this, on Wednesday 10 January 2018, Fed is exactly 30 years old. Well, it is if you count the day the portal to Fed DataSpace first opened up to users of the Compunet network.
But actually my first encounter with Fed was earlier than that. I was the very first person to play it, when it appeared in its first multi-player form at a games fair in Croydon, south London.
I had dabbled in multi-player games, playing MUD (the very first of this kind of game) but never really progressing far with it – it was too easy for a new player to get killed and lose everything. I had spoken a few times in MUD with another player who was at the very highest rank, a Wizard. The player was called Bella. When she told me she was going to write her own multi-player game, with a science fiction setting, I was very excited. Hearing about Fed’s first pubic outing at the games fair, I headed off to the Croydon public library so I could take a look.
Setting the tone for just about everything that came later, he was late arriving at the fair, and then it took him a while to get everything set up so that two people could log into Fed at the same time. Bella was one of them – and I was the other, the first player of the game.
You couldn’t do much at that point, just walk around and talk to the other player, but it was so exciting to explore this new universe. I think it lasted 20 minutes before crashing! But it was tremendously exciting, and I had a real sense that this game was going to be something completely different from anything that had gone before.
When the fair finished I twisted Alan’s arm to give me a lift back to London, and on the way back we chatted. That was the start of our friendship, which lead to me becoming a top player on Fed when it finally opened on Compunet, the writer of the manual and a regular news bulletin, a moderator on GEnie Fed and finally a CEO of the company that took Fed to AOL and then onto the internet.
And all because I had gone to a games fair in Croydon.
