[karajorma]

A friend of mine invited me over to play on his new PC and he had a demo of FS1.

When I got my own PC years later I went looking for games the day before it arrived. I saw FS2 on sale (big box edition) for £10 and remembered that I had enjoyed the demo of FS1 so I bought it.

So FS2 was the first game I ever installed on my PC and it's also been the first game I've installed on every single PC I've owned since

[TopAce]

Basically it's a long story, but knowing my abilities of telling a story, I think I will put it quick anyway:

A local game magazine named 'PC Guru' releases one full-version game monthly with the magazine itself. One of these games was FreeSpace 1. I tried it, being curious how does a non-SW simulator looks like. I do not know what impressed me on that game that forced me to try FS2, maybe the whole or the story? I do not know. Next year, I asked FreeSpace 2 for christmas and I got it. I immediately installed it and completed the campaign. At bearbaiting, I almost stopped, but somehow I thought it must be one of the last missions, so I regained some confidence and patience and completed Bearbaiting and then High Noon. It did not end. I became interested what might come after the Shivan command ship went down(I thought that Sathanas was the only one).
Strangely enough, I completed FS2 sooner than I did FS1. I do not remember the reason exactly. When I played FS1, I was a child aged 11 or even fewer, so when I got FS2 and completed it, I knew nothing about FS1's storyline(It is merely one more addition that I probably did not understand much of the brieifngs or I even did not read them).

[Woolie Wool]

I browsed a Descent website, saw FreeSpace, and fell in love at first sight.

[Fragrag]

Ahh, it was back when I still lived in the states, my friend was playing it, I was only, 5 or 6 and I saw blasting weird ships and seeing "BOGIE ON YOUR TAIL" "I CAN'T HOLD ON". I thought it was pretty cool, but I didn't get to play it I did get the name, "Freespace". I'm 12 now and I recently downloaded the HotU Version (I love that site, makes me recap all the games I missed), I dun really play the game after Bearbaiting and the fact I accidently deleted my save games

[Taristin]

Topace: You were 11 in 1998?  How old are you now, bro?

*edit* Checks TA's profile...

Oh..... Huh.

[IceFire]

The year was 1997, the month was December....the place was the PC Gamer website.  They had a preview of a new space sim...I wasn't all that impressed originally...it looked almost as good as WC: Prophecy but that was about it.

Roll on February 1998 and I was hooked.  New screen shots, new information, new V website, and I decided to make my own...FreeSpace Command.  The days of such webmasters as Gowron, WildWolf, and others.

Beta tested the FS1 Demo, saw some neat stuff, found the game to be totally incredible and the music was really great too (mission 3: chaser).  Away we went....

I really should reinstall FS1.

[TopAce]

Originally posted by Raa
Topace: You were 11 in 1998?  How old are you now, bro?

*edit* Checks TA's profile...

Oh..... Huh.

I don't know how old I was then, I only made a guess... maybe wrongly. Don't have a clue, really.

Yes, until March 21, 1998, I was 11.

[pyro-manic]

I found the FS1 demo on a cd from one of my dad's pc magazines (he'd just bought one, so he had a load of old mags kicking about). I played it, found it hard as hell (never played a game like it before) and eventually gave up on it (I kept getting killed by the Satis freighter). A year or so later, I was in Electronics Boutique (now Game) with a friend, and saw a copy of Freespace 2 on a shelf. The friend was looking for a new game to play (we'd just got through Half Life + expansions) and I recommended it to him on the strength of the FS1 demo. He wasn't convinced, but I said I'd buy it off him if he didn't like it.

Needless to say, we were very impressed by it. I got him to copy it for me, and played it several times before taking a look at the volitionwatch archives. That led me to HLP.

[Falcon]

Man from my church let me borrow Freespace 2 for a while (this was 5-6 years ago). After borrowing the game for two years he let me keep it.

Then a few months later I found Freespace 1 and Silent Threat in a store called Target.

[Fergus]

The words "Greatest Space sim EVER!!!!!!!!!" from one of my mates, who is usually rather sedated about games (he recently described Rome:Total War as "Really not that bad").  Picked it up in a White Label box with FS1 and 2, all along with Ground Control and GC:Dark Conspiracy, all for £10...one of the best buys that year.

[Roanoke]

FS2 was in PCZone's top 5 space shooters so I bought it on a whim.

[Stunaep]

My first space sim shooter I ever owned was TIE Fighter. Back, it was, I believe 2000 or 2001, I got this really kewl new computer (64 mb of RAM! An 8 mb ATI Video Card! A CELERON PROCESSOR!:eek2: ), and so, having heard of an updated win95 version of TIE Fighter, went out searching for it. Eventually I gave up looking for it, and went for X-Wing instead.

So this guy walks in, and sais, hey, I heard you were looking for X-Wing, I've got just the thing you need.

Naturally, it turns out, that the game he had wasn't X-Wing, but a, for me at least, an unknown space sim called Descent: Freespace.

I was hooked from the moment I clicked the moon-and-star icon.

[Mad Bomber]

I was over at my dad's boss's house while they were having a talk, and I was 12. The boss's son (or nephew or something) showed me Freespace 1 on his laptop.

I was floored.

This was exactly -- ex-freaking-zactly -- what I had imagined space combat should be like, right down to the "artificial wormholes" all the ships used to get around in my made-up Lego fleet.

The guy said I could keep the game, since he wasn't playing it anymore. It was on a burned disc anyhow, and he could make more. (Wonder if that guy ever came back to FS...)


I knew FS2 had come out, but my attitude was "How can they possibly top FS1?" for a while. Eventually I caved and bought it in late 2000.

[Ghost]

Dad found the demo online(back in the days of 56k.. ew) and we bought it one day at Circuit City... then, when my dad was a well established member of SSC(his callsign was SSC-Taz), we found the FS2 demo and bought that when it came out...

[Axem]

I downloaded the demos to FreeSpace 2 and Descent 3 one time. I though FreeSpace 2 was pretty cool, the nebula mission was super cool. The escort science ships one wasn't.

So couple years later, I was browsing these X-Wing Alliance forums and a topic was "What are some other space sims you play?" or something to that effect. One of them mentioned FreeSpace 2, and had a link to HotU. So I decided to go get the full version. Also I found the SCP almost right away as well, and surprisingly the SCP ran on my old P200 (no media VPs however). However I quickly got annoyed by the lack of voice files that made me press F4 every 5 seconds. I installed the Babylon Project afterwards and played that for awhile.

So I mentioned FS2 to one of my friends, and he said that his brother had a copy. I got him to let me borrow the game. I only got Disc 2 first as some sort of twisted joke. But he eventually gave me the other discs. Almost a year later, the discs are still "borrowed".

[Flipside]

I saw Freespace round a friends house. I remember being amazed by the Engine Glows in Glide

I actually bought FS2 by mistake. I was in PC World and saw the name 'Freespace' on a game, so I bought it, I never even knew that Freespace 2 existed. You can imagine how blown away I was when I first saw Beam cannon in action, it was like nothing I'd ever experienced before

[MatthewPapa]

It was 1998
I purchased my first PC
450 Mhz P4, 256 Mb of ram. It was BEAST at the time.
Had my computer for about a month and when i was throwing out the box I found an interesting CD at the bottom: the freespace 1 demo. I played and was hooked from the start. I had already beaten TIE fighter and X-Wing on my old mac so difficulty wasnt a problem. I could never get ahold of the full version until 2001. Once I got freespace 1 I wasnt even aware of freespace 2 until I went to :V:'s website. I then spent a good 2 years trying to aquire it until emule came along and all my problems were solved!

[Nico]

Got FS1 in a magazine ( yup ). loved it, so I bought FS1+ST+FS2 ( +descent3 ) from a guy on ebay.

[Knight Templar]

I bought a Gravis Blackhawk joystick and FS1: Darkness Rising came with it. I loved it and played it over and over, but I had no idea the game didn't end after you capture the Taranis. Seemed like a great cliffhanger to me at the time.

Later on, I went off to Best Buy to Total Annihilation and I found it in a bargain bundle pack with Freespace 2 for $25. Played it, loved it, then went back and found FS1 about a year later to figure out what the hell happened between capturing the Taranis and the NTF.

[Mongoose]

I've been a long-time Descent fan; I first played D2 at a friend's house, bought the Definitive Collection version of it, then got D3 in the same way.  I remember seeing the FS2 ad on the D3 CD folder, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.  (Shivans...Vasudans...Terrans? )  Anyway, at the same friend's house, I also saw a box that read "Descent: Freespace."  Since it didn't seem to fit in at all with the Descent games I knew, I didn't really give it much thought; I though it was some strange variant.  I actually can't recall where I first found out about it; I may have seen it in a store and read about it.  Anyway, I either bought it or got it for a birthday.  I was instantly hooked; the feeling of flying through space in a starfighter, blasting away at Shivans, was amazing, and the graphics blew me away.  (Ooh...explosions )

Anyway, some time later, I saw another copy of FS, but this time it was bundled with Silent Threat; taking advantage of what might be a one-time opportunity, I picked up the second copy.  I wasn't a huge fan of the main campaign (I was never able to beat the Hades until reading about the trick of hiding in the engine nacelles in a walkthrough), but the fan-made missions were awesome (the Destiny of Peace set was my favorite ).  The version of FS I had included a trailer for the second game, and I was blown away by the look of the nebular effects and beam cannons.  (From the trailer, I had absolutely no idea of whose side the Colossus was on, and as for the Sathanas's red beam effect at the very end...I thought they were engines. )   I did download and play the demo, which I thought had graphics ten times better than the original game.   However, I was never able to find a copy in stores (this was within the past few years).  I also stumbled across this site somehow, and I read as much about the game as possible.  (I did have some elements of the game, like the Sathanes/Into the Lion's Den/the supernova spoiled for me, but I didn't really mind; I didn't think I'd ever get a copy.)

I was almost driven to try out eBay (even then I didn't/still don't really trust it) and bid the insane amounts that they were going for there, but I got in contact with a fellow Descenter who had a friend with a copy of the game.  Unfortunately, he wasn't able to get me a copy.  I had vaguely heard about the HOTU version, but I didn't really understand it, so I didn't look into it.  To my utter joy and surprise, however, Interplay chose that time to release its 20th anniversary edition, and I took quick advantage of it.  I was amazed the first time I played it, and the rest, as they say, is history.