An Ode to Age Of Empires

For all the places I lived and travelled to, it was my first visit to the land of my kindergarten hero. In one of those strange work hazards, I was to indulge in touristy sightseeing to the palace which was worthy of the great warrior. And then it all came back in a flash. 

Srikanth - Sauron

Vamsi - Vams

Varun - Chinna

Udayan - Knight

Rahul - Jing Bang

Me - Tipu Sultan

The all-conquering villainous dark emperor of Lord Of The Rings was Srikanth's alias. Sauron appealed to his preference of  brute power and mismatched domination. 

Vamsi, who was never accused of being too creative when it came to names, (will save the incredible story of the naming of his pet labrador for another day) kept the alias Vams.

Varun was the no-nonsense chap, who couldn't be bothered to come up with a novel alias. His nickname sufficed for him. 'Chinna' meant the 'little fellow'. 

Knight, which is a horse-mounted cavalry military unit symbolised valour, pride and a staunch dedication to cause. Udayan aspired for all these values in his game. 

Jing Bang is the sort of ridiculous slang term only someone like Rahul could come up with. It signifies a crowd, and assembling one in the game wasn't ironically his strong point. 

Age Of Empires 2 was the greatest LAN Video Game to have ever been made. And it was worth spending every last penny of pocket money we had at Reliance Web World. We would reach the place a good couple of hours before it even opened in the morning, unable to contain the anticipation to try out the brilliantly thought-out strategy of the sleepless last night. So persistent we were that the closing hours were often extended and exclusively for us. 

 And when we exhausted the last penny of pocket money we had by the penultimate year of our engineering course, we set up our own gaming network, alternating between Vamsi's empty penthouse room and Rahul's  mom's makeshift office. A laptop was considered a valuable tool for learning and no responsible parent could deny his/her son this tool. Needless to say that this sentiment was exploited for a good cause. And so many a night were spent carefully building civilisations, raising armies, devising strategies and then going into battle till only one team remained. 

We were not one of the millions who played that mindless Counter Strike  across college campuses in the country. Neither were we part of the sordid group, who gamed Age Of Empires with a sort of mechanical efficiency,  which prized speed of fingers over sharpness of the mind. 

We were the unabashed purists, the dreamy philosophers who played the game the way it was meant to be played. For us, Age Of Empires was an elaborate battle of the wits, a game of chess stretched to its extreme limits by pondered craft and  guiltless imagination. 

Having long archers protected by  multiple front lines of pikemen infantry and flanked by Saracen mounted camels is an effective defence strategy against an advancing horde of Persian war elephants, complimented by bombard cannons and cataphract cavalry. And that is not the sort of pulsating  wisdom, you pick up in Switching Theory and Logic Design or some other crappy course like that. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to say we learned more in those 'virtual' battlefields that we ever did in the 'real' classrooms. (The words 'virtual' and 'real' to be interchanged?)

Prologue:

Tipu Sultan, with his pencil moustache, despairing at the advanced infiltration of the British troops sits down for a meal on the  insistence of his subjects. As he is about to keep the piece of bread in his mouth, the messenger enters hurriedly and conveys that the main gate of the palace has been breached. Tipu, places the food back in his plate, his facial expression betraying the slightest hint of exasperated helplessness and crestfallen resignation. But it quickly changes into a cold, steely stare into space, the fiery spirit of royal defiance flooding back into him. He reaches for his famed sword, swaggers to his feet and marches into inevitable death. And immortalised martyrdom. 

I watched this scene in black and white on a CRT, on the Doordarshan Network as an impressionable 5 year old. I went to my mother and told her that I was going to be Tipu one day.