I Am Not a Lobster

I am not a lobster.

http://elitistjerks.com/blog_attachm...1&d=1238560237

That is, the nickname I have chosen use has no relation to a crustacean that has become known on a popular satirical animated show. I am of course referring to Zoidberg on Futurama.

I hate that guy… fish… thing.

Every time I encounter someone new on the Internet, one of the first questions I get is, "Hey did you name yourself after that Zoidberg guy?" It gets a bit frustrating to tell people that I did not. I've used Zoid since 1989 when I first started communicating online.

In 1989, I moved from the small ranch town I grew up in central British Columbia to Vancouver to start my career as a computer programmer and game developer. Of course, once I got there I discovered modems and start hanging out on dial up BBSs (bulletin board systems). One of the first ones I signed up on was a multiline chat service called Shoreline that required a nick name.

I thought long and hard about a nickname I needed and I wanted something with a unique sound, a single syllable and sounding kind of future like. The "-oid" sound was cool so I stuck with a Z and tried to sign up as Zoid. Turns out the name had to be a minimum of five characters, so I was having fun and signed up as Zoidphun. Yes, my original online name Zoidphun. It was the days of early online communication and there was a lot of l33t speak and phreaking, etc. You think kids these days are new to l33t speak? It's decades old now!

So I got online and started to present myself as Zoidphun. I spent days chatting away, making posts, etc. Then the meets happened. We were all chatting online in the same city, let's go meet together and get a coffee or a bite to eat. When I showed up for these, everyone went by their online names. There was Zoid (it got shortened pretty quickly), Tealady, Ice-pic, Masky and all sorts of weird online names. Since I was in a new city with a new career, pretty soon all my friends were people I met online and they all called me Zoid.

Since then, I've always gone as "Zoid" as my primary name both professionally and personally. It sort of took over my identity since it formed during the time I had moved to a new city to start my career. When I made ThreeWave Capture the Flag in 1996, it really started to take off as my online name, Zoid, became heavily identified with the game.

In 1998, a new animated television program premiered on the FOX network called Futurama. It was Matt Groening's new show after his success with the Simpsons. I loved the show--it was full of geek humor, wonderful writing and some interesting new animation styles with some pseudo 3D work. There was just one issue: they named one of the main characters Zoidberg. What's really strange is if you look at Zoidberg's entry on Wikipedia you find, "The name Zoidberg comes from an Apple II game that David X. Cohen made in high school called Zoid, similar to the game Qix."

The circle of association of things named Zoid gets deeper. In 1999, while working for id Software I gave an interview on Shacknews and one of the questions was things I was interested in and I replied with "Futurama." Shortly after that interview went live, Lew Morton, a writer/producer on Futurama emailed me telling me he was a huge Quake fan and that they were working on a Quake theme in one of the upcoming episodes. I think the episode aired sometime in 2000.

He mentioned that the producing and writing staff for Futurama was more math and science geeks than gaming. He said his previous show, NewsRadio, had a huge Quake following on the staff. Comedian Joe Rogan apparently was quite the Quake fanatic and even set up a four machine LAN for the game.

So, Zoidberg and I aren't quite as distantly related as I originally thought. Maybe it was parallel thinking that caused us both to share similar names.

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