Aimless and Happy

The Tang Avenger

2008-05-16 at 6:52 pm (Pennidren)

Long ago while I was in college, I did many silly things.  One of these things was The Tang Avenger.

At the time, a movie was being released by the name of Titan A.E.  You might remember it, although it was not very memorable.  Somehow some friends and I stumbled on the website promoting the film.  The promotion was cute for the time; sign up and either create a space ship or join someone else’s.

There was talk of the ship with the largest crew (most registered users) being given some sort of “prize” but I can’t imagine that actually came to pass in any meaningful form.  So, The Tang Avenger…  It has been so long, I really don’t recall if we created the ship from scratch or if we just joined the most crazily named ship we could find.  But once onboard, we decided to be the best.

At the time I was fiddling with Visual Basic 6.  Through some very kludgey hacks, I found a way to automate registration on the Flash-based site.  The problem was that the emails used to signup had to be valid or they would bounce and the registration would not count.  However, my friends and I had a domain with which we could parcel out email addresses at will.  After creating thousands of phony accounts, we plugged the list into the code I had written and let her rip.

It took days.  Weeks even.  The Flash site was so slow that it could take over two minutes to register an account and sometimes the browser would lockup and foil the automated code.  But as time passed, The Tang Avenger rocketed to the top!

The website had a private forum for each ship.  The theme of The Tang Avenger was that we were space pirates; some pretty funny dialogue was tossed around.  The best part was that some people from other competitor ships would create accounts on The Tang Avenger so they could come onto our ship and accuse us of cheating.  Which I guess we were.  But we never revealed how we did it or even that we were doing anything.  We just called em land lubbers and told em to walk the plank.

Good times.  So when I thought of The Tang Avenger today, I wondered if anyone was talking about it out there one the interweb.  And lo and behold some were!  I have no idea who these people are, and they don’t know me.  Very bizarre; a bit of a legacy.

Oh, and perhaps more amusing is that the domain we used to signup on The Tang Avenger with is now marked as a “Spam Email Url” by my employer’s web filter!