Welcome to TIDMADT, An Online Gaming Community!
Way back in the early 80′s, I was a member of a BBS named TIDMADT. Back then, I was on an 8088 series 1 computer upgraded to 640k of RAM using a 300 Baud Hayes Smartmodem. It is hard for the younger generation to imagine what being online was like back then, a time when text came in one character at a time. Graphics were non-existant, and at that time even the neat ASCII artwork was years from making an appearance. Compared to the megabit on demand world we live in today, it was brutal…
Fast forward to the 90′s. I was excited that the legendary Ultima series was making a massive online game where we would all be able to play together. It was Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series, who first coined the phrase MMORPG. Can you imagine a time when there wasn’t such a thing? A brave group of enthusiasts decided to reverse engineer the Ultima Online server, and the world of Free Shards was born. With a Free Shard server, you could create your own world… change the map, create your own storyline… alter almost every aspect of how the game worked. How could a programmer (and an admitted Ultima addict) resist? I began looking for a domain name for the Free Shard I was running, and was pleased and surprised to find out that tidmadt.com was available. It was mine just as fast as my fingers could type it in!
While there is still a large following for Ultima Online, and for the Free Shards that followed, the internet is now home to hundreds of Massively Multiplayer Online games… there are games in practically every genre in a variety to fit an infinitely diverse playstyle. Whatever is your pleasure, there is likely an MMO out there that fits it.
My latest little addiction has been World of Tanks. In a random match, someone shouted out before battle a general invitation to join their Clan. I had been grinding up, and was itching to join the larger Ultimate Conquest campaigns, so I went to check out their site… I liked it, and I liked the people who were running the WoT division of the Clan, so I signed up.
Clan politics can be a dicey thing at times. It’s like an extended family, one that has feuds and, occasionally, divorces. Politics brought that Clan down, and the entire WoT division (along with a fair amount of the rest of the Clan) came with us. Problem was, we needed a place to go… as I had not been doing much with TIDMADT lately, I offered to make a temporary home for us here. “Temporary” has become “Permanent”, much to my pleasure, and our community has grown… and we hope it will continue to grow.
The division leaders who left the old Clan became the Admins of TIDMADT, and I am honoured to be in their company. We all have similar ideals, similar goals, and a vision for what we hope TIDMADT to become. One of those is that we are a MULTI-GAME, MULTI-CLAN community. While we love playing World of Tanks, there are <gasp> other games that we like to play, too. We wanted to make sure that all of those games were supported on the site. As our membership grows, we will do our best to support ANY game that they want to play… to be truly multi-game, in any way that we can to support our members.
We also decided to be “multi-clan”. Joining TIDMADT is NOT joining a Clan, it is joining a community made up of Clans and their members. While we currently only have one World of Tanks Clan in our ranks, if another Clan came along and wanted to join the TIDMADT community, we would do our best to support them, sharing our resources with them, and giving them their own private section on the forums where they could discuss strategy and tactics separate from our current WoT Clan, the TIDMADT Death Crew. We believe in diversity, and we believe that in that diversity we can only become stronger.
So that is the story of how TIDMADT came to be. Our community is made up of members from around the world. Our history is rich, but it is the bright future that we look forward to.
