Hello World,
With the wonderful developments of late (0.2.5 released!!) I got to thinking about
how I find myself still playing this (admittedly awesome) game and where this thing that gets me so excited began (for myself).
I created this thread as a place where people could, 12 years later, post or guess about when and why they got started with uplink/onlink and are still here.
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Personally I was in highschool when Uplink was released. I don't remember how exactly I heard of it but I assume it was by PC Gamer, which I read frequently through the late 90s and perhaps the early 2000s. I was also heading up a gamehacking group at the time so it's possible that the word got out there.
I played the demo and thought it was awesome. I didn't have a credit card or checking account yet so I know it was 2001 or early into 2002 that I gave money to my parents so they would buy Uplink from Introversion for me. When that CD came in the mail it was like gold to me. I grew up playing games and I remember the reference card for when you create a new agent being a pretty cool throwback. Then a couple months later I was reading on the Introversion forums and someone said something cool happened if you took apart the CD case
I continued to re-install and play the game for years and it was sometime in college that I discovered Onlink, probably from the introversion forums or a mod-list. I remember being back in town from college and sitting in the waiting room at a doctors' office with my laptop and testing a fresh release. In that version the security systems of targets were a bit out of control - using a memory scanner/editor I gave myself an abundance of funds and bought the bypass HUD right away and the best bypassers I could. I went to do a mission, though, and the bypassers wouldn't work. I did a probe and the target system was running something like firewall v7! So I went back to the Uplink marketplace and now v7 of the bypasser was available. I go to a new target, and they have proxy v11! Eventually I think it got up to firewall v17 and the marketplace didn't sell anything that high.
Around that time there was an opening for a writer with the Onlink crew. I applied for it and I think I was in the running but then I think I started partying 24/7 at school and forgot about it. I came back a year later and couldn't log in to my forum account so I had to create this one. By that time it seemed development had slowed,
but now ...
The long awaited continuation of public releases has resumed!! So in celebration, share how you learned of Uplink and Onlink here and perhaps why this game is so attractive to you.
On that last item ... there are a few reasons. One - this game is still graphically current (IMO). I introduce it to friends and don't bother saying "if you can get past the graphics" like I have to from other games of the early 2000s. Also, I've come to make infosec my profession so the topic is somewhat dear to me. But above all, it's just an awesome timeless game that Onlink continues to make even better