SLC

The History of _SLC

By Stonemantle

_SLC (pronounced “underscore Es El See”) is now in its tenth year as a gaming clan and guild with a presence in five different games and clan members’ world wide. SLC began in the year 1997 when four teenagers from England decided that an online identity was required for their competitive gaming. A streak of defeats from other gaming clans as they were known then, sparked the idea of starting our own, giving us practice as a team and hopefully encouraging more of our friends to join our community as we played games we all enjoyed.

The founding members were Peter, Gavin, David and Graeme, all of us were currently losing with some regularity at Starcraft on battle.net. As all other clans currently used three letters as their initials, it was Peter who chose ours, and before long we knew what they stood for. Slow Learning Curve was born. Before long, we had two people called Will in our guild, who most importantly knew how to play Starcraft to a point of actually winning ladder games. Paired matches ensured allowing all of us to compete to a point where we felt we were actually making some progress. Inter clan matches proved to be long and entirely pleasurable affairs lasting sometimes in excess of two hours.

Then something happened. Diablo 2 received possibly the most ground breaking expansion of the time. _SLC purchased the core game and the expansion almost at once, and began to level up a selection of characters on battle.net, most of us getting computer upgrades at this time. We gained a new member in Kat who was to be the first of our overseas players and again, we began making progress through the worlds, with some players having characters up to level 80 and higher. In particular both Williams found their true calling in this game, levelling multiple characters to 99 and attempting even hardcore characters as well.

The next game to see us participate in was WarCraft 3. There had been Blizzard’s usual build up of screenshots, background and stories being released and the game was eagerly bought. To say we were impressed was an understatement. It brought aspects from both StarCraft and Diablo to a game that was polished, intuitive and insightful. The mechanics and control allowed all of us to pick up the game quickly, with players climbing up the ladder with little trouble. This trend continued with the release of the expansion. It was however at this time that our numbers began to dwindle as other things such as college and jobs began to interfere in our gaming time. This however was all about to change and would be the last place to see us named as a clan.

World of Warcraft hit the shelves in England on the 11th Febury, 2005 and was purchased by David and Gavin that very day. Here was a game that actively encouraged the formation of clans, now known as Guilds in a world we were now all familiar with in a structurally amazing role play game. The guild was bought and signed up in as short time and soon SLC began to be seen in the lands of Azeroth on the Draenor server. It was at this point we began to gain members from different countries, mainly northern Europe, but other places too.

And then we merged.

SLC passed up on its latter two letters to become a syndicate with the Tree Hugger guild, swelling our ranks and providing us with new players to make friends with. SLC effectively ceased to be. However it is still discussed in guild chat by members from outside of the original clan, being both a joke and something remembered fondly.