From there to here and back again
Well a little about me. My name is Will Nichols and my birthday is 24 July. I live in Alabama and have done many different jobs in my life and now am self-employed. So enough about that here is the sim history.
Well lets see it all started out way back with a TRS-80; affectionately known as a Trash80. I started playing flight games way back when I first got a computer which had to have been around 1980-1981 as a kid. I remember typing out all the code and then having to go back and figure out what a "syntax error on line 1200" or whatever it was from the code book they gave you to type in the actual programming to play the game. I learned a little about programming as a kid and promptly forgot it when we got our first PC and my dad brought home Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle and others just like it.
Well I am going to jump ahead a few years to the fall of 1989 after high school and getting on the bulletin boards and newsgroups and learning about this online game called Air Warrior that you had to use a service called GEnie for...well not having a bunch of free cash that was what credit cards were for. We would get some computer science geeks to hack into the desktop systems in the classrooms and labs and we would play online using the schools online connection and GEnie we would have to pay for. Time was limited since paying for credit card bills was a tough thing for me in college. It was an on/off again thing with me having multiple id's and just hoping I could play it again every now and then.
Jump ahead to Warbirds and I was in a similar situation; wanting to play but not having the resources but only once in a while. With that done I move ahead a few years to Air Attack/Fighter Ace on the Zone from Microsoft. That was a great setup; system requirements met what I had at the time and the dollar amount was spot on...$10 a month for all you could die! It was great; then I jumped ahead a couple of years to the launch of Aces High in May 2000. I had been lucky enough to get in on the beta towards the end of the development and once there I had a hard time going back to Fighter Ace. At that time I was a part of LJK (LuftJagerKorps) which had started in Fighter Ace with some really good guys. We all moved over to Aces High and stayed together for a while; we did have several of our members in WW2OL during the closed beta testing and played it extensively but went back to AH since WW2OL really wasn't a good flight game. After 9/11 happened several guys decided it was time to move on and either quit gaming entirely or left AH to go to other games.
After LJK disbanded in late 2001 I bounced around as a loner and visitor to several squadrons and eventually decided on forming my own. In September of 2002 I founded the Aces High version of VF-17 "The Jolly Rogers". There were some great squadron members at different times in the group up until 2006 when I retired from Aces High. I stayed out of the game for about 3 years and in October of 2009 I made a return to the game and to my old squadron. Even though its run by different guys now the characters are just as good as the original members and the friendships are just as strong. I have had a great time being a member of this community for the last 10 years and hope to be able to continue for a while longer.
