Who are the MeatHeads

The MeatHeads are an eclectic bunch of individuals who originally had nothing in common except a desire (more of an addiction) to play computer games.
It all started way back in the days before ADSL and ISDN, back before the term High Speed Internet connection was invented. Way back when only the rich had a 56k modem, and the rest of us had to struggle with the classic rock-steady 36k modem. ( ok, so we were underprivileged and behind the times - lets not split hairs )

MOH - Allied Assault

In 2002, Medal of Honor - Allied Assault was the game everyone played. By the time we came onto the scene in 2003 it had already been out for over a year and the cheats were prolific. You could still play the game online as long as you didn't care that you couldn't hit anyone or that it was nearly impossible to hide behind a solid wall. At least you could run around and chat with your mates while you waited to die...

Strangely enough, even the though the game had been out for over a year, the nearest public servers were US based and attracted a huge penalty in lag - at least 250ms and sometimes over 400ms! Then there was the time difference. At 9pm here on a Friday night meant the only US players on the servers were the diehards that played after midnight Thursday. Most US players were sound asleep before we even got started. It was weird fighting against Australian players on deserted American servers....but that's how it all began.

Local (Australian) servers!!

Apparently we weren't the only one who found this bizarre because before long Australian servers were springing up all over the place and then we started to see some real improvements - we could actually walk around the map instead of teleporting! There were some servers which were looked after by good admins who would kick cheaters as soon as they started looking suspicious, but on the more accessible public servers, if you were not running cheats, you didn't stand a chance. Seeing as we were pure of heart and did not believe in (or need to for that matter) use artificial enhancements to beef up our own natural abilities (and nobody would tell us where to get the cheats anyway - bastards) the launch of Medal of Honor - Spearhead in August 2003 provided us with the first opportunity to keep ahead of the cheaters.

It was about this time that easymeat earned his handle - but then he got better and started to become a serious threat to his team mates (bite me!). He was also building a reputation for dealing with the enemy despite being limited by a 56k modem. Call of Duty wasn't his only killing zone either. There were many Wolfenstein ET users who trembled whenever easymeat hopped on their server as well...probably because they knew that I would be along to give easymeat a helping hand :)
KillBill arrived on the New Zealand scene about this time and the three of us became quite an effective group - that is when we managed to be online at the same time on the same server.

Arrival of Call of Duty

The biggest change happened when Call of Duty arrived in time for Christmas 2003. Thanks to PunkBuster there was no such thing as being cut up by a teleporting super soldier who walked through walls! After that there was no holding us back. There were many occasions when any one of us could arrive on a server and would have an immediate impact on the scoreboard. And when things went according to plan, at least one of us would be able to top score. Of course there are still occasions when we get our arses kicked, but that's what makes the game unpredictable and why we all like to play as much as we do ("Just one more game...I'm just warming up...I'll show him who's boss in the next round..." - anon)

We all know how hard it is to go one-on-one with someone who has 1/4 the ping you do, but the much anticipated arrival of an ADSL connection didn't signify the change in survivability that I expected. It merely demonstrated to me that a faster connection just means that you can watch yourself get shot up in real time.

Our first server

Easymeat soon got bitten by the bug that still plagues him even now - the curse of the custom map. It was the discovery of these maps that eventually led to the creation of the first MeatHead server as it soon became obvious that there were no custom map servers in New Zealand at all (Its not hard guys!).

Easymeat ran his machine as a shared server (not that he used it for anything else) and MeatHead was born. Fortunately for us there was never really a queue of players lined up to play...at least not at first, because his machine couldn't handle more than a half dozen players at one time, and stopped if anyone got into a vehicle (actually, some of the big ISP's were to have the same problem when CoDUO was released), but it was good fun and it was great to be able to play any map you wanted - some of them are very good. We struggled on like this until I finally pulled my finger out and built our current game server out of all the spare bits I had been stashing in boxes all over the floor in the bedroom for most of the previous year (a twin PIII-733MHz with just under a Gig of RAM).

CoDUO Released - MeatHead server opens for business

The early September 2004 weekend that Call of Duty - United offensive was released was the weekend the new MeatHead server was tested. We were among the first hundred severs online. (by the end of the weekend there were nearly 500, and after a week or so there were over 1000.) It was to be another week or two before it made it into its present home under the bench in easymeat's computer room in Waikenai, Kapiti, New Zealand.

This opened up the MeatHeads to a lot more players (in the first 3 months we had over 850 new visitors! - compare this to the handful we had in the previous 6 months). We quickly developed a small following of players from New Zealand, Australia and from as far away as Europe! They were gamers who were either frustrated with the culture on the bigger servers or tired of the old maps. Sometimes it was just the fact that our server ran 24hrs a day 7 days a week and often we are the only server in New Zealand with players on it after midnight!.

Another factor we soon discovered was, depending on who's network you were connected to, our server pinged lower than some of the big boys in New Zealand and Australia, and still does.
It was in this environment that easymeat began to obtain his new reputation as the Bash King. It was soon discovered that there are very few people on the net who could compete with easymeats sub 10ms ping in a close combat hand to hand assault. Personally, I think thats why he's so reluctant to go out into the internet and play on other servers. He needs that 90ms advantage to be competitive! (What was that! Is that someone creeping up behind me...)