It was before I started surrounding myself with jaw-dropping beauties and supplying my liver with overpriced alcohol from clubs. Yet, somehow, my New Year’s Eve 2000 was by far the most fun I’ve ever had celebrating the dawning of a new year. It wasn’t even that it was my first in San Francisco and the one celebrating the start of the new millennium, but just that it was fun in the purest of forms.

I had just moved into San Francisco to work at IGN.com. While I looked for a place, Sam Kennedy (Gamespot then and 1up.com now) agreed to let me move into his 1BR apartment in the Mission District if I paid half the rent. Once I got there, Sam K & I convinced David Toole to leave is well-paid position atTarget back in Orlando to move out here on a whim because he could easily get a game industry job too. He moved. He quickly got a job with Sam K at Gamespot.

For New Year’s Eve we decided to get a bunch of friends together, all mostly from the #vidgames IRC channel that lived in the Bay Area. It ended up being myself, Toole, Kennedy, Sam Bishop (who eventually ended up crashing in the living room of Sam K’s apartment with myself, Toole & even my brother all piled in), Darknight, Rugalz, & Prisoner (went with the IRC names for the last three ;).

We started drinking early while we played all sorts of games in the crowded living room, including a lot of the Japanese import from Konami. Guitar Freaks. It was pretty much the precursor to Guitar Hero that’s taken the nation by storm over the past year or so, yet we were playing it and loving it back in the last millennium (aka 1999). There was even a time that Kennedy & I walked around all over the Mission District to try and find a prostitute that we could pay to play the game with us naked (I was even going to do an IGN article about the hooker playing Guitar Freaks), but we failed because they kept on getting picked up by old men with cars.

But, I digress, it was just an amazingly fun night of playing videogames with great friends while getting completely shit-faced on all kinds of alcohol. Then as midnight neared, we decided that it’d be fun to break into the Ziff building to see the fireworks from the rooftops. We trekked our way over there while yelling “Happy New Year” to everyone that we passed. Then when we got there, we used our skills learned from years of gaming to sneak past the security guard and then run up the parking garage and onto the rooftop of the building.

The adventures didn’t end there. After witnessing the fireworks and the dawning of the year 2000, we headed back to the apartment to celebrate the fact that the world hadn’t been destroyed by Y2K. On the walk back, we passed the most atrocious looking hooker imaginable. She looked to be 50 years old. Was wrinkled head to toe. She was missing most of her teeth. And she just looked flat out disgusting. She offered us “a blowjob for a quarter”. We declined.

Then amazingly enough, as we were maybe a block or so away, this car comes driving by and the ugly hooker was hanging out of the passenger window and yelling at us “you guys missed out on a blow job for a quarter!” Hilarious. Fucking off-the-charts hilarious. Somebody actually picked her up. Good for her and good for him. I guess. Anyway, the alcohol drinking continued, the partying continued and the gaming continued. A definite happy fucking new year.

You can head to the bottom of My Photos to see a few snapshots of all of us geeks from that glorious and unforgettable night.