The Ballad of Deadeye Dick

It was a time of change, the dawn of the new millennium was approaching fast. There was a sense of anxiety and fear in the air. Fear causes even smart people to do stupid things.

Taking my time navigating the backside of the hill tops, stopping on occasion to make sure I was not being stalked, or seen by a wandering patrol; I closed in on the rendezvous point. Sancho was probably already there waiting. He’d been in the squad for quite a while now and I was only recently recruited.

I managed to avoid detection and was finally in position. It was a heavily wooded hill top which over looked the encampment below where our target was supposedly hiding. To my surprise, Sancho was nowhere to be seen. Grinning with pride, I couldn’t believe it, had I really made it there before him?

A sickening feeling came over me. What if he got caught? What if I had to carry out the mission on my own? But my thoughts were broken by the sound of gunfire below in the camp. I unshouldered Gemma, my trusty Barrett light fifty, and started to scope the camp which at this point was crawling with enemy combatants. In the middle of this mess, there was Sancho hunkered behind an old APC (armored personnel carrier) as hell broke out on all sides.

I saw a hostile skirting the APC trying to flank Sancho, so I let Gemma sing. One shot center mass did the trick, but also alerted the others to my position. So I slowly shimmied back to look for another position.  

At that moment I noticed the text box pop up at the bottom of the screen:


Sancho: Welcome to the party, Deadeye Dick! What kept you!


Oh? You knew I was talking about a computer game, right?

The game was Delta Force, it released on the PC in 1998. At the time, I worked shift in a factory and a couple of my co-workers told me about the game, and how they played after the night shift to wind down before going to bed. I’d played other first person shooters before, but mainly Star Wars related. This was the first time I was actually playing online with and sometimes against another human player.

The graphics were nowhere near as good as they are today, but for its time DF was really impressive. We’d usually play for about an hour. Even my boss got in on the games, and before long we had 10 of us all online trying to kill one another. Of course this was all part of the fun, and I got to shoot my boss every once in a while too. (I think for my boss there was probably the same appeal, as he shot me several times as well ;) ) We played for a couple months until people either lost interest or didn’t have time.

When DF2 came out we tried it, the graphics were better, but because the computer were not the newest or the internet connection was too slow, we suffered a lot of lag time. And I developed motion sickness as the resolution of the games improved making it absolutely no fun to play.
When I see my son playing on the gaming consoles with his friends, I sometimes think back to those days and remember Sancho singing the ballad of Deadeye Dick.

Did you every get into PC or online gaming? Half-Life? Counter-strike? Delta Force? Ghost Recon? Day of Defeat? Medal of Honor?

Or did you have other team building activities with your co-workers?

Let me know in the comments below.

And as always, please be sure to recommend!