By PHOENIX NEFF
Sheridan High School Student
Sometime in January of 2014, I was playing Destiny, a game on my Xbox One. The next two weeks changed my life forever.
As I was playing, in the middle of the grind, I hit the plateau at a certain level that I could not pass without entering a special mission called a raid. In Destiny, a raid always consists of six players. I was playing on my own.
I was on Destiny’s ‘Looking for group site’ looking for a raid team to get put in to make my journey easier, when I came across the gamertag puff5000. I saw the marker saying he was aiming to complete ‘The Vault of Glass Atheon’ (Atheon is the last boss in the raid). When I joined the party, there were six people including me.
My future friend puff5000, with a thick British accent, asked, “Is everybody ready!?!” and so we got started.
While in game, another person named SHOOT2KILL39 (from Tennessee) said close to nothing.
In the Vault of Glass we almost killed the last boss, Atheon; however, I accidentally died by jumping off a cliff and everybody blamed the loss on me. After the incident, I acquired the name “NO-COORDINATION.” Every time I made the team fail they would scream this name at me, but thankfully, it doesn’t happen anymore.
While trying over and over we failed too many times and could not complete it. Annoyed, the other three people in our group stopped playing with us, so only three remained: puff5000, SHOOT2KILL39 and me.
After the unfinished raid, SHOOT asked if we wanted to play Crucible (a player vs. player game), and puff and I agreed. We instantly became best friends, and after that mess, we kept in contact almost every day over that whole year.
Over time we became a small raid group, only gathering others to help us when needed, such as when more difficult raids came out in later downloadable content. puff5000 is the type of guy who doesn’t take no for an answer but always helps you when you’re down. SHOOT, on the other hand, is the type of guy who usually keeps to himself but is also extremely loud when he wants to be.
In 2015, I was introduced to many of puff’s friends, but none of SHOOT’s. One of these friends, pandinan (also from London), is still one of my best friends to this day. I can still remember that when I was introduced to pandinan, one of the first things he told me is that I sounded like a spastic. pandinan and I never really conversed with each other until about half a year later until a small indie game called Rocket League came out. pandinan was especially amazing at it, so we dueled very often with each other. No matter how much effort I put in, I could not beat him, which fueled me to keep on playing with him, trying to improve.
About another half a year went by, and we lost connection with each other. The main reason was that everybody started to switch to PC, but he stayed on Xbox. We then all proceeded to get an app called Discord (a voice chat service akin to Skype). I made a group called The Misfit Exhibit, our new hangout which we still use today.
A couple months later, pandinan introduced me to one of his friends, Lappy (from Georgia). I asked Lappy himself how our first meeting went, and, like the others, he said after a few seconds of talking to me he knew I was “a genuine spastic.” Later on, Lappy frequently started showing up in my Discord server, and now we talk almost every day.
Four years later, I’m still talking to puff5000, SHOOT2KILL39, pandinan and Lappy. Nowadays, our chat mostly consists of toxic conversation toward one another, but in the end we’re all still best friends.
After the four years of friendship, my life would have been a lot more boring without them. The experience from meeting these epic-sauce gamers has been quite the extraordinary time. At the root of all of this was the internet, and without it would be one heck of a dull life.