Going back to school on Monday, I felt like a king. I had surpassed my friends in a mere 2 days of hardcore questing and grinding. I was completely hooked. From that moment on, I couldn’t get enough of the game. I completely abandoned what I had been playing previously which included the likes of the Halo series, Ragnarok Online private servers, and MU. World of Warcraft was all I could talk about. I brought it up in every conversation I had. Oh, don’t you worry, all these conversations were, of course, with nerdy guys like myself, petrified to converse with a girl who might be of interest to me. After all, this was when I was only 15; I wouldn’t be socializing with many people outside of the gaming world until about 17, but we’ll get to that part of the story soon enough.
Even at my quick-learning and power-leveling pace, it still took a good 2 months to reach level 60. Looking back, I likely could have reached 60 much earlier, but I had also made another new friend from school. Rob had been in the same school as me since elementary school, but we had never really talked. He was known as “Ritchie Rich” among the students in our elementary and high school. This kid had so much money to throw around; he would stand at the top of our massive 4-story school and do a “scrambles” by throwing either a $20, $50, or even the rare time, a $100 bill down the stairwell just to watch kids fight amongst themselves in order to obtain it.
I recall walking behind one of the hot girls in our highschool in the hall one day, I overheard her say to her friend, “Oh my god, so, like, I heard that Rob guy would pay $300 for a blowjob. I would totally do that, easy money!”. Damn was I jealous, this kid is going places! Of course, as far as I ever knew, that was just a rumour and he never had actually offered that deal… but who’s to say he wouldn’t take her up on that offer? He had money to burn!
Rob enjoyed the gaming scene as well, and we were both around level 40 when he began to grow tired of the grind to level 60. Around this level range, the leveling pace really began to slow down, and there just simply were not enough quests to keep it interesting. To continue progressing, you needed to simply kill packs of monsters over and over again for hours (or even days) on end before you could make it to the next area of the game and be a high enough level to start new quests. Rob didn’t want to level himself anymore, so we came to an agreement.
Depending on the level range, he would pay me per-level to level his character up as well, an Undead Warrior. This agreement certainly slowed my pace as I was leveling two characters at a time. At this age, I was always looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, always looking to make a buck. This gave birth to the perfect scenario – I could earn money while playing a game I absolutely love! We instantly became friends, and I leveled him up to 60 along with my own character.
We began playing together, selling him levels on his character, and also selling him gold when he was short. This netted me a few thousand dollars over time, which I carefully kept out of sight from my parents. They would have never understood – making money from playing a video game? That must be illegal right? Such is the generational gap of the baby boomers vs the Gen Y / Millennials. Even to those well-versed in the internet at the time, the video game industry wasn’t what it is today.
Today you have a few teenagers competing on a stage with tens of thousands of people in the audience; and tens of thousands more watching online live feeds to see who will take home 5 million dollars in a video game tournament.
Back in 2005, it would be very rare to hear of anyone making money playing a video game unless it was Major League Gaming (MLG), which was pretty much just the Halo community at the time. This would also have my parents running in circles about how making money from a “stupid video game” would never be a way to make a living – that I was taking advantage of this new friend of mine whom quite frankly, was becoming one of my best friends already – that I would ignore my school responsibilities to game hours on end and my grades would tank, therefore not making it to university and making something of my intelligent business-oriented mind – that I would be stuck for the rest of my days with only one or two real friends who were just as rejected as I was in the view of society and the prejudicial views of a gamer being a dumb lowlife with no future to his name. So many directions with which I could fail, so many people I would disappoint, so many years living in my parents’ basement. It would all turn downhill and I would become the slow decay of a human being that the world liked to portray a gamer as.
So no, I decided I will keep the money-earning aspect of this game to myself, and I will save the money or spend it on items my parents would be none-the-wiser to – oh yes, the perfect plan. Suffice to say, I didn’t become a degenerate or blow all the money away on weed or alcohol or drugs that the media and adults loved to shove down our throats.
This ended up being the beginning of my cash fund I would eventually use to buy my second car, a brand new Chevrolet Camaro in January 2012. This car began my love for Camaros, I adored my beloved Camaro in its shiny ‘Imperial Blue Metallic’ colour, RS package with 20-inch wheels, bluetooth connection and convenience package, and silver rally stripes. I bought it 8 months after starting my first full time job out of university, as a Cost Analyst at the leading generic pharmaceutical company in the world. Not too shabby at all for a lowly gamer who spent mostly every night on the computer during his high school days. I was doing something I loved, and I was making some cash on the side.