I wanted to share my memories.

My earliest memories of the internet were back in 2005. I still remember the long bus ride and walk to the nearest shopping centre to purchase a phone line cable from Dick Smith Electronics in Northland as my modem didn't have the right connector for our units old phone lines.

My mum saved every dollar from my early birthdays and when she explained this to 14 year old, I hounded her to purchase a computer for me.

Thankfully she did, and I remember going through the arduous process of getting the internet credentials, loading the modems driver, the ISP connector and needing to manually connect to the net, then pulling up my first website playboy.com haha

From here, I returned back from the library with a bundle of HTML and web development books (mostly the dummies series) and drafted my first tests into notepad, then opened the saved files into the early Mozilla versions to see it in all its glory.

From here, the first mention of World of Warcraft was amongst my high school friends, who were big Warcraft 3 players. We all made a pact to purchase the game and begin playing it together.

I played on the Gilneas realm with my school friends, and whilst they rolled Alliance, I somehow decided to go with horde and rolled a Hunter called Rover.

Over the months, I leveled up super slowly and fell in with a guild of RL friends who graciously allowed an Aussie teen to come on board. They were my first community I ever fell into and took me into instances, enchanted my armor and weapons, helped me tame rare and exotic pets.

My real end game raiding happened on the WoW forums where I was an infamous troll on there and interacted with a lot of server personalities. A lot of people knew me, and it was a love hate relationship most players had with me. I was targeted a ton in PVP and god knows I probably deserved a lot of the griefing thrown my way. Never trust young testosterone fueled teenagers with anonymity.

I famously skipped two weeks of school just to play it. Such was my love and addiction for it.

All in all, WoW was my first taste of interacting with adults in a serious and meaningful way. I learned to:

- Code in XML

- Use Windows in a much more advanced manner by trying to hack

- Understanding how to make strategic choices with gear

- Learning teamwork in instances and raids

- Got my first dollar online by farming gold and selling it

- Got my first job online freelancing as a video game reviewer just to pay for my WoW subscription (which led me to a lucrative career in Digital Marketing. 14 years later, I'm Head of Marketing at startup).

I owe so much to this video game. It had given a young child from a poor, single parent household a lot of hours of escapism, plus developed crucial tools and skills that I translated into a professional career which aided in my ability to rise out of my social predicament.

I'll never forget the magic of opening up the discs, the smell of the packaging and waiting hours for it to download & patch to play.

You can never talk about World of Warcraft to me without bringing up the bittersweet pangings of nostalgia for a time that will never be re-created.

I have forgotten the names and usernames of so many online friends who I spent an incredible amount of time with, but I will never forget how they made me feel and the overall memories of the game.