The History of the Old Retarded Dogs

A Brief History of ORD
The urge for collective gaming flows strongly in the blood of the founding Tards.
More than twenty years ago Gordo, Goatfoot & Glock would gather for weekly pen-and-paper RPG fun. Chainmail, D&D, AD&D, C&S, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls, Call of Cthulhu, and many lesser known titles (Stalking the Night Fantastic, anyone?) were played and enjoyed.
Additions to the gaming collective in later years included Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Badger242 & Tungsten. We started painting miniatures and supplementing our pen-and-paper gaming with Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battle miniatures wargaming. Group electronic gaming reared its head as Gordo's old Nintendo allowed us to gang-tackle Super Mario Brothers powered by 7-11 Mochas (1/2 hot chocolate, 1/2 coffee), Hostess Snowballs and an unquenchable lust for coins. Time passed. Ivan joined the army and vanished for several years, then returned. Jed got old enough to drink. Gordo went off to university after eight years of savage battle with Junior College. Sokks made a career move from waiting tables at Italian restaurant here for a job waiting tables at Italian restaurant in Santa Cruz.
Miniatures gaming slowly faded, while RPG gaming made a return to prominence with quality titles like Deadlands and Hell on Earth.
We also started getting together at Ivan's place out by the prison every so often to hook up a bunch of PlayStations so we could butt heads in Thrill Kill and that cool robot game, with the mechs you could customize.
The Distant Past
PC gaming got its hooks in Gordo's soul while he was away at university. As the first adopter of Wintel computing (Ivan, Corto, Glock, Badger, Tungsten and Goatfoot were all confirmed Mac users at this point), Gordo was the first to feel the power of Doom.
Faced with the choice of writing a 75 page term paper or spending all night battling the minions of Hell, the choice was obvious. To this day Gordo remains a spiritual slave to Doom- his refusal to strafe stands out on-line in much the same way his ears do in real life. The Doom infection was spread to the rest of us at annual Thanksgiving feasts, which ended up being equal parts gorging and gaming. Even confirmed Marathon enthusiasts could see the potential of any game featuring a chainsaw.
The seeds that eventually blossomed into the drooling flower of ORD were planted at regular LAN parties starting sometime in 1999. The slow migration from Mac to Windows was relatively complete (except for Badger, who clung to his Mac with religious tenacity until it expired of congestive hard drive failure- since buying a whole new PC cost about the same as a new drive for his Mac, he finally made the move).
Glock's first Wintel PC was a hand-me-down collection of bits box hardware put together by Gordo and christened The Pity Box. A P2 133 with 64 megs of RAM, an old Diamond Monster video card with a 2d daughter board and pass-through cable, it just BARELY ran Quake 2. Ivan had gone Windows because he needed a machine that could run 3D Studio Max to pursue his dream job as a video game designer. Ivan and Glock started hooking up for modem-to-modem Starcraft battles, and getting together for one-on-one Quake 2 and Halflife deathmatch action. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to our first *real* LAN, which was held at Glock's house (believe it or not, for those who have seen it).
Folk in attendance for an afternoon and evening of Q2, Shogo and HL deathmatch were Gordo, Sokkmonkey, Ivan, Jed and Shasta. Glock's wife suffered a culture shock she will probably never recover from, and everyone else caught a FEVA for multiplayer ak-shown that only more LAN fury could satiate.

The LAN Age

This period saw us gathering at Ivan's virtually every weekend for good times and VERY late nights. The initial regulars were Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Pork Chop and myself. After a couple of weeks, we were joined by Tungsten and his pal Wyld Wolf. Eventually Corto was lured into the mix, while Gordo joined in during his summer visits from the East Coast and Goatfoot made appearances from his home base in Northern California.
Our original games were Quake 2 and Half Life deathmatch, with some Shogo thrown in for spice. We also started experimenting with a new thing, Half Life 'mods'. Ivan got us to try out Sven Co-Op, I was an advocate for Deathmatch Plus (which we could never get running) and Sokks kept pushing the first Action Half Life beta, which was an unplayable mess. Of course, Sokks eventually redeemed himself by championing a little mod that showed a lot of promise- CounterStrike, which we started playing regularly just as Beta 3 segued into Beta 4.
Regular attendance swelled from a dependable three or four players to a dependable ten. Our gaming population had outstripped Ivan's spare room and the overwhelming stench of close-packed gamers forced us to seek a new home. Rumors that the real motivation was Ivan's wife snapping and menacing us with his Claymore after one too many raucous 3am shouting matches are totally unfounded.

The Compound

Fortunately, Sokks and Jed's folks had recently bought a swanky house in town. A house which happened to feature a giant, empty garage. We may be Tarded, but we're not stupid. No time was wasted in constructing a huge LAN table out of 3/4 inch plywood and some sawhorses. The parts box was borne across town on a palanquin of oiled Teak wood by a procession of us wearing velvet robes and hoods. We christened our new gaming palace The Compound, and proceeded to consecrate its ground with an ocean of virtual blood.
The Compound was mostly a CounterStrike venue. We honed our skillz against each other and became highly adept at hardware and software troubleshooting, as well as building up our networking muscles. We learned valuable life lessons that continue to serve us well, such as DON'T FUCK WITH SHIT ON GAME DAY! and THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS 'TOO MANY' CABLES!
During this time Ivan was the king of the hill, his killin' fury unchallenged by lesser mortals, the T. Rex of the Compound.
A hardware arms race erupted as the masses embraced technology in an effort to close the Ivan Gap. From two button mice, to three button mice, to wheel mice, to optical wheel mice, special mouse pads, cutting edge video cards, CPU upgrades, extra RAM, the Compound was a technological Galapagos where unfit hardware was exiled to the parts box to rot alongside the broken headphones, sticky keyboards and kinked network cables of yesteryear.
Alas, no cybernetic enhancement replaces raw skill, despite the glittering promises of manufacturers. Ivan's reign continued apace, untroubled by the seething of the proletariat throng at the foot of his throne.

The Name
During the Compound days we toyed with the idea of a tag we would all wear, showing our allegiance and solidarity. We fiddled with different ideas, searching for the strangest tag we could find. The first name that stuck for any length of time was {Fg&h@S}, the Free, Gay and Happy All Stars. Inspired by one of Sokkmonkey's dance music MP3's, we identified with the theme of carefree outcasts gyrating the night away, untroubled by the social expectations of The Man.
But when we started thinking about maybe putting together a web page the name became problematic. None of us were actually gay, and the vision of confused, search-engine savvy homosexuals pondering the arcana of CounterStrike gaming tormented us in the dark of night. We decided to scrap the name and start over, in the interest of peaceful slumber (The Free, Gay and Happy All Stars live on as an official TARD HAUZE Anthem, played at LANs and other ORD events to get the party started).

The next name to flirt with immortality was [Gl337].
Gleet was discovered by Gordo during esoteric academic research, and its foulness is best left to the imagination. Regardless, it was nutty enough to attract a following, so we all ran around as [Gl337] for a while. But once again real world considerations intervened. We discovered 'l337' had a pre-existing meaning in the on-line gaming world. The thought that our silly name might be misinterpreted as some sort of bragging about our (modest to nonexistent) gaming skillz prompted another change.

And so we come to [ORD], our final port of call.

Ivan started the stone rolling down the hill. At one LAN we were playing Assault, and Sokkmonkey and myself kept trying the same losing tactic every round. Eventually Ivan said "you two are like a pair of old dogs, doing the same damn thing every round and drooling all over yourselves". Over the course of several subsequent evenings it evolved and caught on, and we have entered the arena of gaming combat as the Old Retarded Dogs ever since.

Welcome to the Future: The Online Era
Of course, everything changes. If you're lucky, one Golden Age eases into another. Which is what happened with us.
People started moving around, disrupting our LAN get-togethers. Wyld Wolf joined the army. Sokkmonkey got a real job and stopped coming down every weekend. Jed was accepted to the CHP academy and took off for Sacramento.
This could have spelled disaster for our gaming group, but the forces of Karmic balance were at work behind the scenes. As some were moving away, Gordo graduated from Princeton and moved *back* to California, about the same time Ivan was exhorting everyone to forget about LANs ("ancient history!") and embrace the FUTURE; high-bandwidth on-line gaming. While much of this messianic urge can be attributed to his misanthropic nature and intense hatred of physical labor (like packing up a computer and moving it across town), skeptics soon discovered an element of visionary prophecy in his ravings.
The first ever ORD game server was hosted by Corto on his spare cable modem. It was a modest CS server that maxed out at six players, but it was the spark that ignited the fire. It demonstrated that a bunch of us could get together regardless of where we were physically, hang out together and chat and socialize- and incidentally play a game. What a revelation!
When Gordo landed a year internship at a major Southland college, he found himself with an office, a computer...and access to a really, really, really phat pype. It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to set up an improved ORD server for our gaming needs. In short order he had a stable CS server with a 20 player limit running.
Gordo christened this prodigy 'The Tard Dog Hauze ---woof!'

THE TARD DOG HAUZE

Our original full-time online home, the Tard Dog Hauze (aka South) is where ORD evolved from a bunch of friends who gamed together into a 'real' clan. The connection was a huge improvement over Corto's cable modem, but by any objective measure it was terrible.
Network administration at the school was an endangered species, verging on extinct. While this was good in the sense that our server hummed away without fear of regulatory interruption, it also meant that unwashed masses of students were foolishly allowed to do whatever they liked with their own connections. Combine lax enforcement with the insatiable student hunger for pr0n and mp3s and you have a recipe for LAG.

Of course, calling the Hauze 'laggy' is like calling The Sultan of Dubai 'well off', or saying Hannibal Lecter is 'mildly eccentric'.

Lag at the Hauze came in many flavors and gradations; Baskin Robbin's 31 flavors wouldn't begin describe its range. Lag was to us like as snow was to the Eskimos- we had a hundred different words for it, and were constantly discovering new ones. Lag that drove newcomers to gibber, weep and hurl their mice across the room in frustration would barely raise an eyebrow among the Hauze veterans. We were experiencing Bullet Time long before The Matrix & Max Payne introduced it to the masses.

At the time we didn't see any benefit to the lag: we endured it with the stoic acceptance of Russian peasants trapped in the hell of Stalingrad: sure it was a bombed-out ruin, but it was OUR bombed out ruin, dammit.
In hindsight, intransigent lag on the Hauze was an important factor in the creation of the community.
Even then, CS had more than its fair share of l337 d00dz who thought their superior gaming skillz entitled them to harass and denigrate 'lesser' gamers. The lag was our ally in keeping these sorts of people away- after a few rounds of riding the bucking bronco that was the Hauze, most of these sorts were thrown from the saddle and wandered out of the corral for good.
The folks who stuck around did it for the company, not the silky smooth connection. They weren't looking for a solid platform to show off their CS skills, they just wanted a friendly game in congenial surroundings. And there were plenty of people who did stick around. From day one, the Hauze attracted persistent strangers who showed up night after night and eventually stopped being strangers. We were faced with a historic crossroads when some of these 'regulars' started asking if they could join ORD.

Expansion and Empire

Strangers asking to join ORD triggered a minor identity crisis.
What did they wanted to join, exactly? WE weren't sure what we were, and we'd started the whole thing. What we were NOT was a clan in the traditional sense; we had (and have) zero interest in any sort of organized competition, the driving force behind most other clans.
The whole 'clan' thing was a joke anyway- I mean come on, 'Old Retarded Dogs'? We were making fun of all the 'Shadow' and 'Execution' and 'Force' and 'Ninja' type clans, overwrought adolescent sorts who took their gaming waaaay to seriously in a "Daredevil could kick Batman's ass!" sort of way. Eventually, we decided "what the hell!" (which remains a popular battle cry at the Hauze). With a name like Old Retarded Dogs, how serious could we get about 'recruiting' anyway? A short while later someone who had been hanging around the server literally from the day it went up, @o@.Capt_Howdy, became the first non-LAN member of ORD.

ORD MEMBERSHIP

The process of choosing members was every bit as slapdash as the rest of our organizational policies, and our record keeping is no better. Since we're not smart enough to remember exactly who joined when, here's the best we can do: a rough membership timeline of the Tard legion, divided by geologic era.

Post CounterStrike
The end of our official clan involvement with the game that we'd followed since our earliest days was marked by the September 11th terrorist attacks. An assortment of internal and external pressures convinced us it was time to move on and find fresh gaming pastures. Forward thinking Tards Gordo and Ivan had already made this move, and they set the stage for another ORD transition, from the Tard Hauze South to

The Black Pit of Lag
After his departure from the notable school that unwittingly hosted South for us, Gordo's talent, ability and glistening Ivy League credentials landed him a tenure track position at an even grander California university, where the server ground was fertile and relatively unplowed. These network police were numerous and aggressive, but also concerned entirely with lowlife students running FTP servers out of their dorm rooms, not respectable Ph.D's using their office connections for legitimate educational purposes.
In short order Gordo set up a legitimate, educational game server for his pals. It ran Urban Terror, a modern combat mod built on the Q3 engine (think 'pretty CS minus missions'). While running the UrT server we made more friends, the quality individuals who make up the clans Agency and -MAC-.

ORD has become a postmodern clan, divorced from the standard underpinnings of game clans (competition, love of a single game). The ties that hold us together are the same ones we were founded on- friendship and camaraderie.

In Conclusion
It's been a strange journey. What began as a couple of friends in a spare bedroom became a group of friends in a garage, then even more friends and a bunch of total strangers on a server, and eventually into quite a number of friends, strangers and strangers who became friends on several mailing lists, forums, multiple servers, different games and computer platforms.
Looking to the future, we remain dedicated to creating a gaming oasis for folks who like their fragging without the usual side order of juvenile machismo, regardless of the game.

Change is the only reliable constant in life, and the best you can hope for is that one golden age overlaps the next like shingles on a roof. The quality people we've met and befriended across the years ensure no leaky gaps overhead at the Hauze.

You can measure our success by the company we keep.