I Miss Cool Gamer-Tags (Handles)

Hello folks. Welcome to the new digs. Some of you may already know me from other projects, but I know many of you might not. That's okay; I completely forgive you. But, I will have to remedy the problem. As you can clearly see from the post-entry credit, my name is Ashton. But, online in the gaming world, most people would know me as x8xid82: my very hard to figure out gamer tag. Go ahead, figure it out. I'll wait... I can't even begin to tell you how enjoyable it is to hear adolescent ass-hats scream at me on voice chat for either dominating them or more often than not, being a complete failure as a teammate, "Dude, Ex-eight-ex-whatever sucks!" And at that, I feel like my night is complete. It may be the only reason I haven't bothered coming up with a new one. Were you able to figure out what it said? Here's a hint and the story of how it came to be.

Back in the day, before gamer tags were called as such, we had things called "handles" or "screen-names". Yes, I'm that old. I'm an elder millennial that remembers the before times when online gaming existed at 28.8kbps. My handle back then was Reaper. As you can imagine, I was not the only genius using this handle and eventually had to upgrade to Reaper with random strings of numbers at the end depending on what game server I was joining. Which, let's be honest, is lame-sauce. I flirted with several screen names, mostly all based on my favorite movie Hackers. Look, you try being born in 1982 with an interest in technology and call me when you find something cooler to do. To say the least, nothing ever stuck or totally ever sounded right. So it's because of this I never became a famous hacker that took out a Gibson computer with my friends.

At some point in time, I can barely remember when my friends and I started a website. RPGHavenX. It was a BBS, which meant something completely different than what you naughty people are thinking right now, that eventually became a full website and forum. It was meant to be a resource for our Role-Playing games and eventually evolved into RPGX our company and the custom Pen-Paper system that I was developing. The X was meant to mean generic, and thus the RPGX system was born. Like all great things thought up by teenagers, it was quickly forgotten when girls started paying attention to me. However, somehow the X always stuck as part of our ongoing brand. (Remember this because I will come back to it.)

At some point, a friend of mine introduced me to the first-person shooter and I fell in love. I had played Doom before, but it wasn't that big of a deal to me until Quake and Ureal became a part of my life. But, right around the time that PlayStation was hitting its stride the concept of Trilogy IP's took off. On PlayStation there were a number of games to choose from; Die Hard Trilogy (One and Two), Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and last but not least, the Alien Trilogy. All surprisingly good games for the time, my favorite being the Alien Trilogy. A long-time fan of the genre I had all the movies, comics, books, and yes, even the toys. It wasn't long before I discovered the now long forgotten cheat code 1G0TP1NK8CIDB00TS0N. I had never seen anything resembling L337 speak before and damn I thought it was cool. Something about the way "Acid" was spelled with an 8 was just the coolest thing to me.

Back to my previous infatuation with the letter X as a generic "burn" letter, and my love for the movie Hackers, I finally settled on a screen name. 8cid_x (Acid Burn) but as you probably already figured out on your own; the online gaming scene was evolving and Xbox live was now a major player and everyone had their own competing services. I was sad to find out that my super rad "gamer tag" was not compatible with about 50% of the services out there because they did not allow numbers as the first character. Eventually, the name, begrudgingly at first, morphed into x8xid82. This was right around the time of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which I played extensively. The first time I heard my enemy cursing my name in a confusing mishmash of consonants and syllables, I was hooked. My name in that instant became the stupidest troll ever devised. Whether I was getting called out in lobbies for being a formidable opponent (it does happen sometimes) or just a lousy support player, it was really hard to rage quit listening to the other people mutter nonsense.

While this may all seem silly to most gamers now, screen handles used to be a source of great pride. If you had a cool one, you were the man. A great screen name commanded the chat rooms and dominated the online forums. These days I see so many random streams of numbers that I'm sure people think that my screen name is just a generated login by whatever I happen to be playing. To me, it's more. I can't begin to tell you how upset I was when my PSN account got hacked and I had to make a new one (no I couldn't get Sony to get me back into my account, but that's another story.) And I had to make a new account. Thankfully they allow duplicate screen names in their network, but it pisses me off to think that someone hijacked my name just to get to my game collection. (If I ever find the punk who did it I will go Taken on their ass.) But, I think this is a thing that should come back. As an elder millennial, I plead to the next generation to bring back the cool screen names. Stupid prefixes are not just for DJ's in Florida, folks.

So that's the story of how I ended up with such a bizarre name. I will probably rehash this in my first video once I start posting content. But, I think it'd important and I think it tells you a lot about what kind of gamer I am. I'm about the flash, I'm about the online identity. More importantly, I'm all about the trolling. The truth is I suck at gaming and the only way I'm going to get any joy out of it is to win by flat out baffling the other people playing with my stupid screen name. And that makes me the real winner.

What's your gamer-tag/screen name and how did it come to be? Was it something random or did you spend hours coming up with it? Does it say anything about your online identity or is it just a tool for logging into websites? I want to hear your stories about how you came up with your online name as well as your stories of envy over someone else's cool chat-room name. (I was so jealous of BobbaFett69 and KnightMare). Drop the comments below.