The whole thing started in 1996 when I took another job in San Diego. I was originally working the graveyard shift in Garden Grove for the Orange County Transportation Authority as a mechanic. I had a 1 year old son at the time and could not seem to gain enough seniority to get myself off the graveyard shift. So this new job had many positives. I was now working during the daylight hours and actually had weekends off, even better I was suddenly making enough money to quit my second job as well. With all this good news there had to be a downside right?

Well the downside was that this was a water treatment facility treating 30 million gallons of wastewater per day. Sounds bad but it turned out in the end to be a great job. Early on I was able to manage my own workload and had much free time. In 1998 Half-life was a big thing and a few of us played online in the evenings. We were a bit obsessed with the game and continued to play during the workday. We were unable to connect to the internet servers thru the firewall but were able to create a listen server LAN game and we battled during the lunches and breaks. The IT manager got wind and suddenly all the fun was taken away from us.

This caused me to look into creating my own server. I didn’t know anything about it or what was necessary to make a good server. I bought a good cheap used Mac Mini on eBay and gutted the operating system and installed Windows operating system on it. Sounds lame but if you know Mac hardware they make real good stuff, it worked out well until the server became somewhat popular. The game at the time I was hosting was ‘Gunman Chronicles’ and the server name was Sludgeworks. That game burned out real quick but the online servers continued for years. More interesting games came online and this server became empty until gunman was released in Europe and server was full for a few more months. In 2002 Most of the players I knew moved on to ‘deathmatch classic’, so I created the server and played but lost interest after a short time of hosting the deathmatch game.

This brought me back to my friends at work; they were playing a different type of game at the time called Counter Strike. It held my interest so I made a server at home with the name sludgeworks. But for whatever reason my server remained empty. I found other servers on the steam network to play, one of them kind of blew my mind as it was a deathmatch style game playing Counter Strike! I set out to figure out how it all worked. I made all the necessary changes and after a month or two, traffic began to climb at the server. After a while one player seeing the need offered his help. To this day Gonzo continues to be a major asset to the server and game play there. The server has had the privilege of a large following and many helpful admins and players that made the server a winner.

But things are changing again. Newer games are available, old players have not returned to the server, and traffic continues to fall short of hopeful expectations. So what is in the future for Sludge? The quick answer is ‘I’m not entirely sure’. Whatever the future brings I hope that it keeps everyone’s interest in a fun place where the only people excluded are the rotten ones that should be. Please be advised that this is not a ‘farewell’, rather it is a reaffirmation in my interest in development of the server, thank you for your interest in the Sludgeworks server! -=AssAssN=-