Recording all of the stupid things we've done over the years is a project without end, but at long last it has a beginning.
In the eldest days, in 2008 and 2009, Josh, Dave, Matt, Kyle, and Phil disassembled their custom-built computers, transported them to Aaron's basement, and reassembled them on tables. Runs to Family Fare for mountains of ice cream provided sustenance while we mostly played Left 4 Dead. In these primitive times, Hamachi was the only real way to play online, and Ventrillo and Skype provided mediocre ways to communicate. LAN parties were ideal, and so they came and went.
Steam had just started selling games for 95% off and the group started building collections. In the summer of 2010, the group acquired Minecraft, Starcraft 2, and Team Fortress 2. The following year, Terraria was released and quickly acquired. Games were getting better and more abundant. At least, most games were getting better. Aaron and Josh bought each other packs of indie games and discovered some really bad games, too.
Aaron, Josh, and Dave began teaching (desert strike) lessons in Starcraft 2, and built their first combined world in Minecraft. More worlds followed. Halloween 2010 introduced the Nether. In 2012, the Minecraft nightmare of Spaghetti was created after Matt and Josh sailed to the first jungle they had ever seen and built a treehouse.
Games continued to be played. Lessons taught. Starcraft 2 maps discovered. In 2013, Dave and Josh began their insane EU4 quest, following years of being terrible at EU3. Shortly after, Dave bought a 4-pack of Payday 2 and the group learned all about Chains being down.
But then something happened that the games did not expect. Children and families started taking away our time. The games faded from a daily event to weekly, to monthly. Dark times had come.
On Sunday, September 3rd, 2017, Matt decided to create an event on Facebook with the innocuous title “Gaming Night”. The simple description read:
First attempt at a planned weekly or bi-weekly gaming event.
Feedback would be nice soon if this won't work out this weekend.
He would soon regret this act.
Google Hangouts was chosen as the communication method and the group proceeded to play games lost to time. There is no record of the goings on of this event, except in the following event two weeks later, which indicated that this first one had been a success.
By the third event, the group was playing Terraria and Matt created a Facebook group to post the events. Since we were playing on Sunday night, he chose to name it “Gamer's of Monday's Eve”. “Blue dooshes” had been the team name for a long time (though oddly we always played on Red Team in TF2), but this seemed like a fitting name for the game nights.
Shortly after this, Aaron pointed out that the acronym for Gamers of Monday's Eve was GOME, only one letter short of GOMEZ, the name of the patron saint of the group. He wondered what word we could add to create the acronym. Josh proposed just adding “Z” to the end, like Day-Z, and thus was born GOMEZ. Even though the group quickly shifted the night to Saturday, the acronym remained, fixed as it was to match the sacred name.
Most of the time, GOMEZ is engaged in the art of playing games badly, but on occasion we extend the poverty of our skills to other arenas, like social media. Below are the greatest of these times documented.
A collection of classes for what would be the world's worst RPG, if ever it was produced.
Facebook once introduced something called “Group Experts”. This mistake was exploited.