Ducain is the head honcho of High Impact Halo , one of the most fully-featured Halo tricking sites on the web and host to the largest Halo tricking community. For those of you who've never heard of tricking, it's basically using your abilities in the game (unmodified) to accomplish feats the designers did not foresee. The goals of tricking vary, though the most popular has proven to be furthering the exploration of Halo 1 & 2's environments.
We spoke with him about his roots and about the community that he's come to foster.
Where are you from, what do you do in real life?
I live in Charleston, WV (no, it's NOT a part of Virginia, sheesh), and I work as a programmer for a local utility company, doing cool things like handling the presentation of utility data for thousands of measuring stations. Hehe, actually it's a great job, and I get to play around with ASP.net, VB.net, PHP, and MSSQL all day. I love it.
What got you started with the tricking scene?
I came to Halo late in the game, when my brother asked me to come over and play this amazing game on his 'Xbox' (huge black thing with controllers attached). At that time, the only other console games I'd played were Super Mario Brothers (remember that kids?), and Super Contra.
I'm not kidding.
So, to make a long story short, Halo hooked a 29 year old married guy, and I started getting together with my brother and playing co-op through the campaign levels (hence my love of the campaign gameplay to this day). After about a year, and after playing through the thing on Legendary so many times it became routine, our Thursday night campaign started slowing down.
During this time, my brother happened across this vid called 'warthog launch' that you may have heard of, and I loved it. Soon after, I began browsing the net looking for Halo related videos and landed on Halo iBonk (which turned into haloib.com and now is apparently defunct), where I found a vid called 'The Three Towers' by Dark Helmet. After this, I just had to try this stuff, so I convinced my brother to get together and give it a try.
We were hooked, and I was hooked bad. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't stop bathing, grow ear hair (that much), or lose my family. It wasn't THAT bad, but still - I was loving this whole grenade + warthog thing.
To wrap this answer up, I soon found halo.bungie.org (choir sings) and became fascinated with all the tricking info there, and more importantly, became aquainted with a great guy who goes by the forum name vshields_ash, who has been messing with Halo campaign trickery since before I was born (well, maybe not that long, but close). He was a real encouragement, and a perfect example of what keeps me coming back to this strange thing we call a community - the people. :)
When and why did you first start up High Impact Halo?
I started HIH in April of 2004, and for no better reason that to dink around on the net and have some fun. I put up a stock phpBB forum a few weeks later, and a steady (but small) stream of visitors would come by and we'd discuss how to land a warthog on the ring of Halo in Silent Cartographer of some other equally insane thing. Fun times. We plugged along slowly, with the tremendous help of guys like LouisWu and Mythica.
When Halo 2 arrived (* plays 'It's the end of the world as we know it..' *), things got really busy. We don't even want to go there.
What do you view as your greatest trick. What about the community's?
Keeping in mind that this is a game after all, and that none of my tricks are as important as say, remembering to buy paper towels at the grocery store, I'll have to say that my personal favorite is when I managed to get three warthogs, a live marine, and MC over to the 'blue hallway' across The Shaft in Silent Cartographer, in single player. It took many evenings of coffee and bleary eyes, and it was great fun. Below is a link to LouisWu's newspost: http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=10279
As for picking a favorite community trick, there's so many great ones out there that I really couldn't pick (I really just don't want any more hatemail), so I'll just say that when I was starting to become interested in this stuff, I found FrogBlast's and Dark Helmet's videos to be very entertaining, and great resources for ideas.
Links to most of Dark Helmet's videos can be found here: http://www.helmetsstuff.com/movies2.htm
FrogBlast's site went down some time back, but with some help from LouisWu and Mythica, we managed to get a complete mirror online, and you can find it here: http://ducain.org/utfoo
Are there any great tricks that the community has yet to achieve but has been trying to for quite some time?
The most insane (but definitely doable) trick that I know of is the T2T (Tower to Tower) challenge/contest that we've had going on for some time. It involves grenade/warthog launching from the top of one blue beam tower in the level Halo to the top of another blue beam tower, and landing there alive. Some guys have come surprisingly close to finishing this. I believe someone will get it, in time.
What do you think trickers will first try to do with Halo 3?
Flood our inboxes and demand recognition for their efforts. Hey, you asked, right?
Really, my hope is that people would play the game for awhile first and enjoy it before trying all sorts of crazy stuff, but I also hope to have a swimming pool filled with gold coins, so ya.