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760, founded in 2004, is a multi-gaming group of players all over the USA, with a few scattered across Europe and Canada. The majority of the members are between the age of 18 and 50. 760 mostly plays first-person-shooter PC computer games over the internet as they compete against other teams. With about 35 members, 760 gives an outlet for its long time members to play casually with friends as well as an outlet to play as a team in one of the major games we compete in. 760 has very strict rules against cheating and no members are allowed to use anything that gives them an unfair advantage, even for testing purposes. 760 promotes loyalty and friendship above all else and this is the main thing we look for in people who apply to join, even above skill level.
I have lived in San Diego all of my life and one of the three area codes here, where I live, is 760. When my members view their caller ID when I call them and see the 760 area code, they know it is me who is calling.
I started out playing a lot of console shooters since when I was younger, they were a lot more popular and easier for younger people to play on. Of course I had played Doom and all of those first 3D shooters on the PC but it was years later that I built a strong enough machine to play anything else on. I got into playing the Unreal Tournament 1 game and I and some friends would play that at LAN parties that we would have on the weekends. Battlefield 1942 started getting popular and I got heavy into that. A friend of mine was at college, across the US over near New York City, and called me up one night. He told me about this game called FarCry that had just come out days before. He told me that it had the best graphics he had ever seen and that I needed to just go buy it. The next day, I went out and bought FarCry with out knowing anything about it and being heavily into Battlefield 1942. I got hooked on the multi player right away and only played Battlefield 1942 a half hour since then.
In Battlefield 1942, I never liked to look like I was a random guy in the map so I started wearing 760 before my name, as if I was a part of a team. It was in FarCry that I started to really get noticed. FarCry had, in my eyes and in the eyes of many who played with me, the best gameplay yet. The guns shot good, there was a decent level of realism, the game modes were great, and the game had better graphics than anything that had come out before it. Like heavy games today like Crysis, FarCry back then was like this... it took a very good machine to play it with all the setting cranked up.
My friend that told me about this game would play it with me online from time to time but he was pretty busy with school so he was not able to play as much as I was. Him and I were the first 760 members. After playing round after round for a few weeks, you end up seeing some of the same names and making some small talk with some of these people. We started asking some of these people to join and some of these people started asking us to join. Snakeeyes and DeathFalls were my first two members, other than myself and my non-playing friend, who joined. Snakeeyes ended up becoming my co-leader and helped me run things at 760 as we got a lot more members onto our roster. We were using free public TeamSpeak servers for a while and then got our own. A website soon followed and then we got a game server.
FarCry was our main game for three years. We were mainly a Death Match team and just about nobody could beat us as a team. We were able to grow into very skilled players all while developing great friendships with the people we played with. We would have at least around ten people all on TeamSpeak every night for quite some time. We would be on there hours having a blast. These were the best years I have had with 760.
There was a new league for FarCry and we jumped into it. Snakeeyes wanted to recruit a lot of new players who were very well known in the community for their skill so we did. Snakeeyes and those new members ended up moving on and starting a new team about a month or two later. I came to the realization that hiring guns to fight for you was not the best way to run a team. You must make sure everyone gets along and personality and loyalty needs to still come above skill level. As of right now, all of these people who left to join their new team have had that new team fall apart and the other teams they joined afterward ended up all falling apart. 760 is still running strong with the majority of its original members and others who have hopped on board along the way.
After many years of playing it, FarCry started losing players and teams were moving onto other games. Battlefield 2 came out and we soon became hooked to the change of scenery from FarCry and a lot of the similar feel it had to the game we all grew together on. We gave that a good year and a half or so and then jumped into Battlefield 2142 when it came out. The majority of my members from years back in FarCry days were still members and playing the newer Battlefield games as 760 members.
The Battlefield games started getting stale so we started playing a lot of Counter Strike: Source. With the small load times and the great custom maps, this was a great game for us to jump into. The feel of the game was way different than the other games we normally played, but after a year of getting used to it, we became pretty decent at it.
We all wanted a FarCry 2 and learned that some of the people who made FarCry were coming out with a beast-of-a-game called Crysis that looked very similar to FarCry but with extremely good graphics and some other enhancements. There was no "Far" in the name but it did have the word "Cry" so we all assumed that it was FarCry 2 since another game with the name FarCry was not announced and this was made by some of the makers of FarCry. Once Crysis came out, a lot bought it and reported about how much power it demanded... meaning that you need a very expensive computer to play it. Everyone was looking for a FarCry 2 and this was not that, though the game still had a lot of similarities including the gameplay and the overall feel the game had. Some of us became devoted to Crysis and some stayed back and played Counter Strike: Source or other games like Team Fortress 2.
Crysis has been a great game that has helped 760 do a lot of growing. We have many new members who joined during this game and who joined during the newer Crysis Wars game that came out a little after. Crysis Wars optimized some of the graphical demands so more people could play it a bit more. This opened the doors for more people to be able to play it... and the price tag of the best video (graphics) cards have been going down in price so a lot more people are able to play because of that.
With all of that, 760 has been around since 2004 and retained a whole lot of the original members who joined way back then, many games and years ago. We are still growing and only getting better than the year before. We hit some rough spots but worked our way through it. We have been viewed as the top team in some of these games and have learned how to work well together. Many of us meet up once a year, some flying from thousands of miles away, for our 760 Clan BBQ we have here in San Diego. Some of the members even attended my wedding. Some of us have met up with other members on business trips or vacations. We are a tight bunch of friends who some call closer friends to them than other friends in their own home town. Show me another group who has not fallen apart after that amount of time, retained members, moved from game to game, had vacations together... we appear to be doing something right.
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