Try to picture the scene for me. It’s a busy evening sometime around 2010. TheHarry Pottermovie series is wrapping up,Mad MenandHomelandtopped the TCV charts, and games like the originalRed Dead RedemptionandSkyrimmade gamer hearts beat just a little bit faster.
It was around this time that a Danish, a British, and a Hungarian teenager walked into a bar. Or, rather, a Skype call. International friendships do be like that. We were still very much on theCivilization 4train at the time, taking that fabled “just one more turn” over and over again, and then there were just the two of us left by midnight, as our Danish buddy had to take his leave.
Imagine his surprise and annoyance when he boots his computer back up in the morning, seeing the call is still on.
“Did you play through the night?” he asked.
“Yeah,” we answered sheepishly.
Skype was a durable little thing, much like we were in our teens, that’s what I’m trying to say. My personal story with the platform goes back even further, to the early high school days where some of my longest-lasting conversations began, around the time when many heathens and philistines preferred MSN with its adjustable fonts and uploadable emojis over the ability to edit your messages.
(I suppose I was destined to end up in this line of work.)
Sure, the calls were always a bit choppy, and it was a bit of a resource hog with little to offer other than familiarity and nostalgia once the 2020s rolled around—and don’t get me started how impossible it was to properly search the archives—but there have been a few friends who just never made the jump to a different platform to chat, simply because they never had to. Skype remained serviceable to the very end, if little else.
Personally, I will miss the emojis the most. You know how they worm their way into conversations over time, becoming part of in-jokes, retooled and refurbished for entirely unusual uses? That happened over and over again, with different contexts for each of us. (Don’t get me started onAmong Usand the secret poop emojis.) The ones with the transparent backgrounds have already been ported over to various servers a long time ago, and I’m more than happy to fork out for Nitro to keep them around, but many have been left behind, even if I’m holding out hope that others will also express an interest to get them across the great divide with some proper porting. How else am I going to underscore my mom’s good mood with the merrily galloping pink unicorn we used for so many years?
In retrospect, I speedran the five stages of grief. Truly, it was only a matter of time before Microsoft would don the Grim Reaper uniform. Denial? I mean, the patient was terminally ill for a long time. Anger, bargaining? I saved the message archives and started to nudge friends across to Discord. It was a bit sad to see the countdown to the shutdown, but that’s as close as I got to depression.
There have been so many games, though. Endless hours ofAlien SwarmandTF2andCounter-Strike, long nights ofCivilizationandCrusader Kings 2andEuropa Universalis 4, many of the historicalTotal Wargames,TrackMania Nations Forever(oh goodness me, 300 hours of poor joy managing our own server), so many different word games,Football Manager, Rocket LeagueandSins of a Solar Empire,Wormsof all stripes, making mods and writing books, a tome’s worth of fun experiences with friends from all around the world.
Acceptance, then. And being thankful. I mean, can you imagine forming decades-long friendships on Microsoft bloomin’ Teams? Fat chance!
A (hug) emoji and a (wave), and that was that. And we continued our conversation that started in 2009—from now on, on Discord.
