"step right up... march... push...
crawl right up on your knees
please... greed... feed (no time to hesitate)"
-- Nine Inch Nails, March of the Pigs
from The Downward Spiral

I discovered XPilot almost by accident while browsing ftp.x.org a few years ago. The README described the game as "multiplayer game which looks a bit like Thrust for the Commodore 64" and I knew that it was only a matter of time before I was addicted. I spent a lot of time in my formative years playing Thrust when I had a C64. After compiling it I was amazed at how well it played and how similar it was to Thrust. It took me a while to fine tune my compile and play settings to get a good frame rate, but pretty soon I was playing Tournament against robots for hours every day.

After learning the basics on my own, I set out in search of a server with an interesting map and reasonable lag. I stumbled on Blood's Music, which I soon discovered was the most popular server at the time. On my first night I quickly worked my way to last place. A few hours later I noticed that I was being attacked a lot, and realized that I now had the highest score on my team and was in second place! Alas, my experience with lag was not always so good. Purdue University has only a single T1 to serve 38,000 students, and it is usually completely saturated. Having developed my flying style in a near-zero-lag environment, I never really learned to cope with lag.

Eventually the University acquired some workstations capable of running XPilot in color with reasonable frame rates. After that I would log on occasionally pay homage to LARDBOTTOM (mainly by flying a LARDBUS lookalike) on the BYU ranking server, which was running a modified Blood's Music. The highlight of that experience was spring break, when the T1 was only lightly loaded and I was able to dominate for hours on end. I attained my highest rank that week (6th?) but soon had to return to standard lag.

Then, in what turned out to be my last few days at Purdue, LARDBOTTOM, my hero, set up the SACRED VAT OF LARD, and I was able to reach #1 on the Filthiest Sinners List, a rank I still hold despite having been off the net for all but about one week of the year for which he's been gathering statistics.

For real information about XPilot, try the Official XPilot Page maintained by the authors. To find other XPilot pages, consult LARDBOTTOM's Index, which is pretty comprehensive.