history of metroid 2002 speed demos archive

- part 1 (june 2003 - 11 november 2003)
- part 2 (11 november 2003 - 30 june 2004)
- part 3 (30 june 2004 - 15 july 2004)


part 2
the metroid hq forum was relocated to this server and renamed the metroid 2002 forum two years ago today. it took me over a week to force life back into it after transplanting it to my server, and every minute i spent doing it was pure agony. i ended up rebuilding my entire server nearly from scratch to try to accommodate this, what was once mhq's forum. when i finally triumphed, the #metroid log looked like this:


in celebration of two years of metroid 2002 forum, i've compiled more history of the site below. enjoy!


liftoff

on 9 november 2003 radix released his 100% run in metroid prime. mine followed two days later, the same day that mhq and m2k2 merged (see the previous episode for more on that). radix and i had originally been competing against each other when we had started the runs in august, but i was not as resilient as he was when it came to some of the more unpleasant parts of the run. i stopped working on it around the fourth segment, then picked back up much later and did the rest of the segments rapidly. thus, he came through with the then-astonishing time of 1:37, while i accepted 1:50. our original pie-in-the-sky goal had been 1:49.

radix hosted his run using gamespy's fileplanet, which gave his quake speed running site, speed demos archive, theoretically unlimited space and bandwidth through its daughter site planet quake (and you didn't even have to get a fileplanet account to download the quake demos and radix's 1:37). i hosted my run, along with kip's old 1:23 any percent, on the new, unified m2k2.

immediately after its release, radix's run was slashdotted, appearing on the front page of slashdot.org, and becoming an internet sensation. publications in numerous languages ran stories on the run, and there was a topic on practically every gaming message board on the internet about it. at the peak of the craze, the first segment of his run was being downloaded over five thousand times a day.

[mockup of radix's 1:37 page at speed demos archive circa november 2003]

people streamed into #metroid on irc, heavily altering the demographics of the channel. my friends and i were now a minority, with random people who had heard about the run and wanted to get in on the action the new majority. the forum saw its memberlist more or less double in size during the period in november and december immediately following the release of radix's run, and the personal attention of retro studios even came into play. sequence breaking had gone mainstream, and metroid 2002 was in the limelight.


a new breed

talking to my friend adam (who had originally introduced me to metroid prime) about radix's and my 100% runs, he asserted that there was no real skill demonstrated in such a run, because you could, for example, try the same trick at the start of a segment over and over until you were successful, thereby distorting your gaming ability in the eyes of the public. i tried to explain to him that it was tradition to save in metroid runs and to use those saves as segment breaks, but he would have none of it.

i considered what he had said and decided that i would try a "single segment" run, probably using the same route as my segmented 100%, as it was still fresh in my mind. i also mentioned the idea to radix, and he, as usual, beat me, getting a time of 1:59 on 28 december. unfortunately, because his experimental capture setup ate the run (he was sending the video directly to his antiquated computer as he played), we have no record of this first single-segment run performed in metroid prime.

radix had beaten me to the punch again - this time without proof, but i still felt that trying to compete with him again would be a waste of time. then, a newb in #metroid called link1984 started trying to get people to run the game the way it had been "intended" to be run, with his so-called "natural route". eventually he mentioned a terrible time that he had gotten using this "natural route", and i knew that i could beat it easily. the only problem would be the pesky freezes afflicting the original north american version of the game.

i tried for two nights, 29 and 30 december, and got a complete, albeit lackluster, run at the end of the second after several superior attempts had been cut short by crashes. the run is downright terrible by today's standards, and of course on a totally idiotic route if one wants to talk about how fast the game can be beaten, but it was the first recorded single-segment run in metroid prime, and no doubt the origin of the term "single-segment" in this community. ironically, my friend adam's distaste for segmented runs forever branded his preferred kind of run with a label derived from the former.

the release of my single-segment natural route run in december of 2003 was the straw that broke the camel's back: my server suffered its first bandwidth overage that month. however, the small size of the overage caused me little stress; i would be paying only a few extra bucks for the few dozen gigs the server used beyond its monthly quota. then, on 6 january, when i was billed for december, i noticed that the overage somehow had not been factored into the total. i wondered if the overage had to be excessive for my host to notice and bill me, or if this had been a one-time glitch.

january saw an even higher overage, but again i was not charged for it. i thought that, as long as i could keep traffic only slightly above what it was supposed to be every month, i would continue to escape the notice of my host and be able to offer the speed runs for download without any restrictions.

enter red scarlet.


m2k2 -> m2k2sda

only ten minutes after the metroid hq forum went live at its new home at metroid 2002 late on 21 november 2003, someone from the super metroid community called deskjockey contacted me on irc and asked if i would capture some material from a party unknown to their community who had surfaced on the gamefaqs message board.

i was mortified when i heard the person's name: agrias oaks. agrias, besides being a character from final fantasy tactics, was an infamous evildoer on espernet, the irc network where #metroid was then located, and whose administration i was a part of at the time. he was a "kill on sight" offender, second only to one other crook. i asked fellow members of the espernet administration about this gamefaqs account, hoping to establish whether or not i was being asked to help a sworn enemy of my beloved irc network, but they were unable to positively identify this agrias for me.

here is the actual exchange (the "congrats" was for finally getting the forum working on my server after over a week of non stop work):


i noticed that this agrias was referred to as a female on the gamefaqs super metroid board. that seemed appropriate - agrias was a female character in final fantasy tactics, after all - but "my" agrias, the infamous espernet lamer, was always called "he". i wondered if this was some kind of clever ruse by him - if he were trying to take out members of the network administration by posing as a girl and then mailing them bombs or something.

i finally decided to bite the bulleta and help this person prove that they really had the best "nbmb" (whatever that was) done on a console by capturing their run from vhs. a few days later, a box from this person arrived.

i didn't know how to open a box you thought might have a bomb in it, so i just said a prayer and yanked it open. inside there was only a single vhs tape.

agrias oaks/bulleta/red scarlet's no-boss-miniboss run as well as her original 1:06 100% runs in super metroid were captured at the same time as trebor selbon's old 23% run in metroid prime: in the last weeks of december, 2003 (right before i did my single-segment natural route 100% run in metroid prime). their runs were the first videos of any kind i captured for other people. i was extremely displeased with my creaky capture device's performance capturing their material - it dropped frames like nobody's business, and, of course, everything came out ridiculously dark. i was placed in the unenviable position of explaining to scarlet exactly why tiny chunks of her runs were missing from the captures.

i needed a place to put her runs on my server. i thought that, even though metroid 2002 wasn't supposed to cover games other than prime and fusion, it would be okay if i made a little directory called 3 (for metroid 3) and unceremoniously dumped the mpeg-4 files that represented her run in there for public consumption. i had unwittingly taken the first step toward expanding the site to its current series-encompassing scope.

as alluded to earlier, my single-segment 100% natural route run in metroid prime, the continuously increasing fame of sesshoumaru's 1% technical demonstration in metroid fusion and the popularity of scarlet's first runs in super metroid and trebor's 23% run in prime caused me to go over my bandwidth allowance for december, but it wasn't enough of an overage to cause me any concern. january 2004's overage was larger than the previous month's, but i still thought i had everything under control, as january's bandwidth overage was again apparently too small to activate my host's overage billing system.

meanwhile, scarlet had been working on her 100% game, finally managing on 1 february to achieve a clear time of exactly one hour. to beat the "1:00 barrier" with 100% had, understandably, been a goal of super metroid runners as long as anyone could remember. i happily captured and uploaded her historic run to metroid 2002, making it available for all the world to download late on 8 february, hoping that allowing speed demos archive to post it a few days earlier would distract most of the traffic away from m2k2.

when i checked the server's bandwidth usage graphs later that week, i knew that something was wrong, but i stuck my head in the sand and hoped that the commotion around her run would die down soon, and once it did, that i would have enough bandwidth left to reach the end of the month without incurring too much of an overage.

it was clear by saturday (valentine's day) that the traffic was not going to subside anytime soon, and so, gravely disappointed, i pulled the plug on her run, replacing the links to her files with a link to the copy of her run hosted at speed demos archive. my server had failed the community, the rest of its bandwidth quota for that month devoured in five days' time.

here's a graph i made in excel based on the data about daily bandwidth use that was made available to me by my host:


and here's an old sig i made out of the traffic graph from my host as it appeared several months later, the huge popularity of scarlet's 1:00 100% still clearly visible:

(the launch of the merged m2k2 on 11 november is also visible at the far left.)

with two weeks still to go in the month, i had a choice between shutting down m2k2 and tph (my other site) and waiting it out, or leaving them up and taking the (i thought) inevitable hit from my host for whatever the total overage might turn out to be. i braced myself and decided for the latter, replacing the links to scarlet's run with this:


to put things in perspective, radix's 1:37 100% at its peak had been using three times my server's monthly bandwidth quota per day. while scarlet's 1:00 100% may not have received the same magnitude of attention that radix's run had, given that my site was obviously attracting more and more talented people like scarlet, i knew that i had reached a crossroads. i had to come up with a way to serve their runs to the community without paying the $500 a month my host was threatening to charge me now.

i decided i had better call my parents and warn them about the imminent gigantic charge to their credit card (which i promised to pay back, sooner or later). they were very supportive, and mom made the suggestion of rotating the content. i thought about it and decided that, with six metroid games and seven days of the week, i could give each game one day (with metroid prime taking the weekend) and still be fair to those trying to download the runs. i went to work writing a shell script to automatically rotate the runs and, on 1 march, activated the new system.

much to my surprise, it worked: bandwidth consumption was down to manageable levels again. and then, a few days later, it turned out that my host would not bill me for february's gargantuan bandwidth overage - it had somehow escaped their notice that i owed them hundreds of dollars in overage fees.

in may of that year, less than two months after i launched the run rotation system, radix told me that his site, speed demos archive, had made an agreement with the internet archive to mirror all of the speed runs he was collecting for a new "other games" section of his site, where he would showcase metroid and other games outside of the quake realm. this solution meant that his constant problems were over with trying to store non-quake speed runs on gamespy's fileplanet service - the internet archive, in contrast, actually seemed to welcome as much content as he could throw at them.

at first, i thought that this development should not and would not affect m2k2. after all, having only one host (in this case the internet archive) for your content is never a good idea. but the more i considered the problem of my server's monthly bandwidth allowance and the explosive growth of the speed running scene, especially what had happened in february with scarlet's 1:00 100%, the more i realized that the time had come to retire one of the two original sides of metroid 2002 (sequence breaking and speed running). the internet archive offered unlimited storage space and bandwidth, something i could never hope to compete with.

right before i left for my five-week academic trip to germany on 14 may, i changed all of the speed run download links on m2k2 to point to the internet archive's copies of the files. i also didn't want to have to worry about bandwidth while i was in germany, so i thought that it was a good time to make the change.

m2k2 had become m2k2sda: i now spent most of my time capturing speed runs of metroid games submitted on vhs to metroid 2002, but the videos, after being captured, appeared not on metroid 2002, but on speed demos archive - they were merely linked from metroid 2002. that effectively made me a maintainer of speed demos archive in addition to metroid 2002, something that would have been inconceivable to me only a few months prior. i was happy, though, having finally found a stable means of distributing the increasingly diverse and amazing speed runs done on the metroid series of games.


annihilation

i returned from germany on 20 june. i was exhausted, but sleep was the farthest thing from my mind: my new capture card, an ati all-in-wonder 9600, had arrived ahead of my return and had already been installed in my pc by my father. it was just waiting for a lucky run to be played through it, and i chose scarlet's new 0:55 100%, the final improvement to 100% running in super metroid and the deciding blow in the rivalry between her and another talented individual, smokey. over the next few days, i learned the ins and outs of my new toy and prepared to initiate a brilliant new era in the history of m2k2sda.

then the second hard drive in my mac died, the one where i stored the originals for everything metroid 2002. i hadn't had the time to make a backup before i left for germany, and so months of work now only existed on the server. i hurried to copy the site from the server to my pc, but on my parents' slow internet connection, it took several days.

it had turned out that the individual who had originally introduced me to scarlet, deskjockey, was suffering from multiple personality disorder. one female personality, marie, had been brought out by scarlet, and now spoke to me every day on irc. deskjockey, taken as a whole, had definitely been a good thing for metroid 2002: thanks to them, we now had our own irc server, entirely separate from the unreliable esper, and i felt much safer with a bona fide hacker on my side nesting in the server, watching everything with paranoid eyes.

i crossed the line when i gave them the root password to the server. i waffled on this for weeks before i left for germany, finally deciding that i should not be the only one who could fix problems that might bring down both m2k2 and tph, given that i would be without a certain internet connection while in germany for the next five weeks. i considered what i had done a reasonable risk, but my girlfriend, rachel, did not agree.

the gruesome nature of deskjockey's real life schizophrenia had been very difficult for me to bear, and so i confided in rachel. i also thought that it would be better for her to find out about "marie" from me rather than to wonder who this girl was i was constantly talking to online.

on the evening of 30 june, rachel slipped while talking to marie, and it became clear to marie that i had told rachel their secret:

"rm -rf /" is the command to erase the entire computer's filesystem recursively without asking for confirmation.

i recall being sick to my stomach, my hands shaking, but otherwise calm enough to think through what had just happened and to prioritize my actions for the next few minutes. i think that living with this individual for months had gone a long way toward preparing me for a situation like this. for example, a few months prior, in a moment of rage at me for doing something or other, they had actually deleted the entire irc server they had created, letting it run from memory alone for a few weeks until they cooled off and rebuilt it on my urging. almost no one suspected anything, because the irc server had continued to run virtually problem-free, even though it no longer existed on the server computer's hard drive. i wondered if the other servers would be the same way now.

because i had just downloaded metroid 2002 in its entirety to my pc a few days before, it seemed likely that at least the core of the site would narrowly escape annihilation, but because the forum data was stored elsewhere on the server's hard drive, i would stand to lose at least the last few months of posts if i didn't squeeze a backup out now before the data was erased (the most recent forum backup i had was several months old). i navigated to the forum backup screen and requested a backup. i received a 'file not found' error, so i reloaded the forum to try again. now the entire forum was gone.

i calmly instructed everyone on irc to meet on espernet and waited for the end to come. radix was still connected to the server (marie had terminated all of my connections) and wanted to know if he could do anything to help, so i gave him the root password in a final hope for salvaging the forum. but marie had deleted the root user, as well.

the final moments of the server follow:

i knew that the rest of my summer break was probably spoken for now, but as i thought about how brilliant this person had been, i realized that i would never be safe online again. suddenly it seemed almost futile to rebuild the server with a genius of that magnitude out there bent on extracting revenge on me and my community.

but i knew that i owed it to these people who had given me so much. i had to try.

Can't wait to hear the rest on marie.

omg spoiler tags plz ;-[

As Nate has already stated, you'll have to wait until the next part to find out.

I remember this very vividly.

I can recall thinking to myself after 'deskjockey_' disappeared from the channel name lists and 'Marie\\\\\' magically appeared:  "What happened to dj?  and who is Marie?"

I just passed it off as something that didn't involve me.

Crazy times those were.

lol Ekarderif.

Sure, bring the old me back. I thought I killed him awhile ago.

Well, clearly the nate-marie bit was in PM. 

Also I just realized that I'm retarded.  Logbot couldn't have been hosted on the server.  (duh)

thanks. by the time i posted it, i had read it so many times my eyes would glaze over if i tried to read it again and make some kind of judgment about it, so it's really good to hear that. a refreshing breeze from reality, if you will.

how i write the next part will probably be different, so i hope you're open to a change. (then part 4 will likely be back to this style.)


i started working on it in august, i believe, but i've been so busy with school lately that i didn't get much chance to work on it again until lately. the part called "annihilation" was written entirely last sunday.

Today in #metroid (edited for relevancy): 

[03:41:55 PM] deskjockey_ (461d13a3@m2k2-13F941A2.com) joins.
[03:42:16 PM] <f0rk> lol
[03:42:24 PM] f0rk is now known as marie\\\\\.
[03:42:25 PM] deskjockey_ (461d13a3@m2k2-13F941A2.com) leaves unreality (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF)).
[03:42:59 PM] <SABERinBLUE> you scared the shit out of me
[03:43:15 PM] <marie\\\\\> deskjockey was not me, though
[03:43:24 PM] marie\\\\\ is now known as f0rk.
[03:44:12 PM] <f0rk> i have no clue who deskjockey_ was
[03:44:39 PM] <SABERinBLUE> wait, you don't?
[03:44:39 PM] <SABERinBLUE> are you being serious?
[03:45:07 PM] <f0rk> yes, i'm being serious
[03:45:21 PM] <f0rk> i only changed to marie\\\\ because someone named "deskjocky_" joined
[03:45:24 PM] <f0rk> that was not me

:?

Random user pulling a prank?

As I read more and more of this history, I wish that I could've been a part of this of some sort of contribute. But, back then was the time where I saved my money all spring and part of summer 2002 just to get the gamecube itself. Oh well, history in the making, I guess.

addendum, the IPs matched on both occurences, which isn't shown in Life's client, apparently.

EDIT:  bah on my addendums, Life's got it covered.

Well, almost certainly it's a prank, but it certainly worth close scrutiny in the face of the slightest possibility of the above-described events happening again.

EDIT: 

SAL> i didn't know i would get any reactions
[16:52] <SABERinBLUE> that was you?
[16:52] <SAL> .....
[16:52] <SAL> yup