I started playing because the game was free. That was the whole pitch in 2003. Splash Damage had been building Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory as a paid expansion, the single player half got cut, and instead of shelving it they let the multiplayer out the door as a free download on May 29, 2003. You did not have to buy anything. You downloaded it and you were in. For a kid that was the magic word, and within a few months the servers were full of people who had done exactly what I did.
What I remember most is that it was a team game first. You could be the best shot on the server and still lose because nobody planted the dynamite. I think that is why it built such tight little communities. You actually needed each other.
The server, and the name
The community I fell into ran a server called On Extended Break. The way I remember it, the name did not start as a clan at all. It came out of a gaming group, a bunch of guys who had been knocked off their feet by 9/11. As I recall it, some of them had lost their jobs in the fallout, and the dark joke about being out of work was that you were “on extended break.” That was the server. That was the whole mood, people with sudden time on their hands and a free shooter to fill it.
Two of them ran it, and I cannot pull up their handles now to save my life. One I think was something like BornAgain, and the other was a big muscle-guy type. I can picture him better than I can name him. They were the originals, but running a server gets old, and neither of them really wanted to keep carrying it. Nightson was part of that same group, and when he signed up to help admin the server he basically picked up the torch. Around October of 2003 he turned the regulars into an actual clan, and the two original guys, instead of killing the name, handed it to us. They let us keep Extended Break. That is the whole reason we existed. We were -EB-, Extended Break, named after a server we inherited from people who were ready to move on.
I was there for that. Not on the very first day of the server maybe, but early. Early enough that when we set up our own forum in the summer of 2004 I was member number four. The clan grew fast. We went from about six people to sixteen in a couple of weeks, signed up with TeamWarfare to play competitively, and started taking the whole thing seriously.
Who we were
This is the part I most wanted to write down, because the usernames are the thing memory loses first. A lot of us picked very specific colors for our names and our tag, and the old site rendered them exactly like this. The clan gold is the tag. The rest is each person’s own choosing.
And the rest of the crew, the people who made the server feel like a place:
There were more than this, and a handful who joined later picked their own colors too. The old site only preserved them for the 2004 group, so anyone newer shows here in plain clan gold. I will keep filling this in.
We actually competed
Here is the part I am still a little proud of. We were not just a server full of friends, we were a ranked team. On TeamWarfare we played as On Extended Break, on the North American Enemy Territory campaign ladder, Sunday nights, full campaign map sets. We climbed from somewhere down around rung nineteen all the way up to rung three out of twenty-five teams by the end of 2005, and we finished with a winning record, something like 42 and 33.
We traded matches up and down the top of the ladder against teams with names like WHITENAME NUBS, xx513clan, SiN, XtremeWarfare, and the Dead clan. The pre-match trash talk lived on little “rant boards,” and reading them back is its own time capsule. Before one match against the number one team, satrn posted, “we’re coming off a good win, I’m feeling pretty good about this one,” and their guy fired back, “Whitename is going to win this,” and stoncold just said, “well, if they don’t, you’re next.” Another report from a match against a clan called DULL: “it went down to the last minute, they planted dyno with five to ten seconds to spare for the win on fuel dump. Very close games.”
For a stretch in 2005 and early 2006 I was one of the team captains during that climb. That is the part that sticks with me. Not that I was the best fragger on the server, because I was not, but that I was one of the people they trusted to run the competitive side while we were actually moving up.
Running the place
By the end of 2004 I had moved from regular member onto the clan council, which was the admin group, the people who actually ran things. I ended up being one of the website and forum people. I still remember Colm posting “Maur, you might want to check the settings” when the board broke, and me digging in and figuring out you could not post an image with an ampersand in the link because it could be used to hijack the forum. That was my lane. Not the loudest voice in the room, the one who kept the lights on. Years later I was still listed as a moderator.
The long fade
Every clan goes through this. The game aged. In 2007 Quake Wars came out and we gave it a shot. I am actually the one who posted the patch notes to the clan when the 1.2 update dropped, but it never replaced ET. Nothing did. Colm put it best, years after: “nothing has ever really been as good as Enemy Territory.” We drifted through Company of Heroes, poked at Planetside 2 and half-jokingly called it the rebirth of EB. stoncold ran a server out of his house for a while in 2008, took it down in early 2009 when nobody was on it, then put it back up that fall for a reunion game that never quite came together. I was in those threads too, nagging him to “install jaymod and get some bots goin, plz.”
I do not think I ever fully let go. By then I was a “retired general” on the roster, stepped back from running things but still around. In 2010 I bragged that we were “the Google of Extended Break.” The last thing I ever posted to that forum, the night after Christmas in 2014, was not about a game at all. It was just this: “Missing the good old days of ET and my Extended Break buddies. What is everyone up to these days?”
A decade after I joined, that is what it had become. Not a clan anymore, just a group of people I grew up with on a free game I downloaded in middle school, still checking in to see who was out there. A free game in 2003, a server named after a bad year, a name handed down, and a few golden years where we ran our own little world and fought other clans for sport. I would not trade it.