Feeling Nostalgic as per my previous Text..I thought it be cool if we could post how or if we remember that Moment when we first came into Contact with FF?
Be it CD,GoG or Steam?
I remember I was Walmart with my then Wife and Baby in a Stroller who is now 21🤯
Killing time fresh of the Heels of 911 not playing to many PC games...
Was busy on my PS 1 playing the first Tombraider at the time...😳
I do remember playing Tombraider on my PC though..Oh yeah Duke Nukem🙃
I Saw the Freedom Force CD for 10.99 at the time..walk past it twice almost left it then thought what is this?
Then said engh what the heck if I dont like it I'll return it...
Put the CD in saw that big hulking purple guy spinning and the rest was history.
I saw it in a game magazine ( could be wizard) and thought it looked cool. I?d never played a pc game before and was always a console player. Bought it and 20 years later I?m still on it. I tried my hand at skinning and was terrible but I always had a bit of an artists eye so did get better. I tend to just do the skinning/ skoping side of it now but do play the rumble room every so often.
I was browsing in the Arden mall (Sacramento, CA) for new RPG games.
That "Silver-age" comic looking artwork was all the incentive I needed. Don't really recall the price, but I bought it and played it for over 4 months before I found out that there was any related content online. I even tried my hand at skinning, it led here...to the greatest forum/fans ever.
Now I occasionally play FF/FFVTTR on steam...when I'm not playing some Fallout game on Xbox. :D
Heh. For me it was pretty early on, when the game was still in development. I read an announcement in some computer games magazine. I liked comics and I liked crpgs and when they announced they will make a game with superheroes with combat similar to Baldur's Gate it immediately caught my attention. Later I got a demo, possibly from the same magazine, and finally the game. And it indeed was cool, I really liked playing it, but ultimately forgot about it and went on. It was many years later, when I was more into modding games that I remembered there was this cool game and wondered if it had any mods ever made for it. I thought it would make a good platform to make mods with 'real' comic book characters from Marvel, DC etc. So I searched the internet but what I found exceeded my every expectation. Also I didn't know until then that the game had a sequel. And so here we are. The first FF site I stumbled upon iirc was Alex's Freedom Fortress.
I saw it in a game store in our local mall. Put off buying it for weeks thinking it was probably not going to be very good. I think there were five copies at first. When there was one left, I said "what the heck" and bought it. Never looked back. I loved the game and then found the online communities. I was blown away by the creativity and passion for it. I still love it to this day and re-play missions when I get the chance. And, of course, try to collect and preserve content.
Same as Dean, it was Wizard or Toyfare magazine. They highlighted someone, Jared I think who was doing comic book based game textures in an article. Some DC characters and this nice looking Bane grace the header of the article. This got Warner Bros. attention and they acted pretty nasty all the sudden about fanart. That in turn peeked my interest and made me think "Okay, now I have to see what this is about!". So I looked it up and then it was Sims and Freedom Force. And found the early communities like NPI and GammaPatrol. I was immediately interested in all the hard work I saw the community putting into their art, that in itself was and is the appeal to me as is how this community is so tight knit even to date online. So collecting peoples works and just glaring at them, it was like opening a present on Christmas. So naturally I went out and bought the game, first time from a KMart. My interest in making content was two fold. I'm groomed, somehow I'm grown and still am actually and then was groomed to learn how to do computer art, game dev and animations basics and soft repair. At about the same time the sickness hit and I ended bed ridden and in need of a hobby. So two and two I got involved then and have kept it ever since. I'm not sure I recall how many copies of both discs I actually paid for over the years after burning them out? I think my card has enough punches that whoever owns the rights to the game owes me a free one though.
Oh, this is fun! I really enjoyed reading everyone's accounts.
For my part, I've told my story before, but not recently, I suppose. I was in high school, and I started getting back into superheroes, which I had loved when I was a kid. I was watching Batman: The Animated Series and other Timmverse shows, and I thought it would be really cool to find a game in the same vein. I went to Wal-mart, and they had two superhero games: the gritty, serious-looking Superhero X and this strange, colorful, cheesy-looking game called Freedom Force. Well, being young and stupid, I bought the first one, and after about 10 minutes, I knew I had wasted my money! Unfortunately, since I had indeed blown my few bucks on that horrible game, I had nothing left for FF. After all, I thought, if the first one was so bad, what are the chances the other was any better?
Later that summer I went back to the store, and I found :ff: in the bargain bin for only $10. I though, what the heck, and picked it up. To this day, I still say that's the best ten bucks I ever spent. I fell in love with it right away. Despite the fact that my taste for superheroes back then was much more serious and much less fun, it still charmed me. I had already been into modding games ever since way back when with Total Annihilation (still the best RTS of all time), so I went online to look for any extra content, and that's when I stumbled across the greatest online community I've ever encountered. I was full of spit and vinegar, but not much in the way of brains, so I immediately set out to get involved and made a lot of big talk about how I was going to make a G.I. JOE mod. I did make extensive notes, created tons of HFs, and plotted the whole thing out...but I was in WAY over my head, and I couldn't figure out Python in addition to everything else I had going on in my life. So, my early days in the community didn't turn out too well. Ha, I still remember Kommando, who had made some art for my quixotic mod, telling me (quite fairly) that I had dropped the ball. I still regret having put him and other artists to so much trouble for something I never delivered.
Thankfully, EZScript came along, and the rest is history. :D
I saw it advertised in a Wizard magazine and thought what game is this where they have Batman fighting Ironman and Cap is in it too and Thor!!!! Went to the mall and found it best game EVER!!!!
I was still in the first year of my first games job, making World of Outlaw Sprint Cars. I'd been introduced to Diablo II by the people at work. I was well on my way to becoming a Level 75 Amazon and discovered what modern computer RPGs were capable of. Someone at work then pointed out a Freedom Force preview to me in the gaming press.
I remember going to their website pre-release and reading a few character bios. I was completely sold by the picture of John Miller (The Ant) looking sad as he stares at an anthill through a magnifying glass. :) That's when I knew that they got it, and that I was going to love playing this game.
Back when this first came out, i bought the disk, yes disk, from a Babbages (I think) at the mall. My friend, Gary, had it first and turned me on to it and I used to take my tower to his house so we could have build fights all the time...when I used to have this thing called "free time". :)