The Loughborough Confederation
Information
The Loughborough Confederation was formed in ~1997 by Brett Davids, a prominent letter-writer through the 1990s in a number of productions, including Amiga Power.
The front page of The Loughborough Confederation's website (which, remarkably, continues to exist in 2009, albeit surrounded by intrusive spam - http://members.fortunecity.com/loughborough/body_index.html ), reads:
Hello Again. I’m the returning Martin J Phone, but pretty much everything else here has changed slightly since the last update. That’s because we’re now using a far more complicated program to write the site, and only hope that it gets rid of the frankly ridiculous download times it has been suffering from.
Now because there’s been very little change, and my page detailing my war of words with The Grim Reaper has been taken away from me as part of a string of scything cuts, I’d just like to take what space remains to tell you just how much he smells. And to look out for me when, in the near future, I make appearances for the Clan.
Indeed, almost like I’m being controlled puppet-like by somebody entirely different.
HELP! - OR HARRY!
It’s at this point during the page where I normally ask for something strange to be sent to me. However, seeing as no-one else has bothered to reply yet, this part of the page now becomes my updately tribute to Harry Hill.
Harry Hill Quote no. 1: “My mum was a lollipop lady. When I say that, I mean she had a long, thin body, and a big, round sticky head!”
Thanks Harry!
Not much is known about the early days of LoC, but maybe, just maybe, Martin J Phone will find this page on a lazy, nostalgic day, and choose to enlighten us.
Around 1998, Darff, also an Amiga Power reader and letter-writer, bumped into LoC in the UK New Comers Clan League. He (I) was amazed to discover their leader was a fellow Amiga Power reader/letter-writer, so set about spending more time around them by playing for them under an assumed name. After some time (could've been days, maybe weeks), Darff left his regular clan and begun concentrating on LoC full time. Thirdman partially handed over the reigns, and a recruitment drive begun, in which LoC's regular faces for the most active part of their history were welcomed into the clan - Sozo, Storm, Soul99, Target, Nuggy, S8n, Pingu, T-Bod, Thirdman, Sparky, Valcrag, and probably a handful more that have slipped my mind.
We soon graduated into the UKCL and I think we did OK, probably our best performance was reaching the quarter finals of the UKCL Cup - I think we were due to be promoted a division in the UKCL too. There was one practice we played against QPD on E1M2 where we were in the lead for the first few minutes, Storm being many frags above everyone, but that was short lived. There was a rivalry between LoC and HSC, with accusations of cheating bouncing back and forth, not least when HSC leaked a demo of their game against LoC to show that we over-camped the RA side of DM3, only to disclose that they were using an illegal quad timer (therefore explaining why we were struggling to nab any quads and take over the map!). LoC won that round with score of something like 70-50, in what was most likely a 30 minute game.
Much hilarity was had in #loc on QuakeNet, including an infamous bath related story from Darff, a cutout of Storm's head being inserted into a porn picture, and amusement when we discovered Sozo pronounced his name differently to how we all thought. The Loughborough Confederation, closely linked to Amiga Power, who were big fans of the game Cannon Fodder, for a time in their prime adopted aliases relating to the classing point & click war shoot-em-up;
- Jools = Thirdman/Brett
- Jops = Darff
- Stoo = Target
- RJ = Nuggy
- Ubik = T-Bod
- CJ = Soul99
- Elroy = Sozo
Brett (Thirdman) left for Uni in 2000 to become a dentist, and is now more powerful than you could possibly imagine. Target went to uni at around the same time, so disappeared, but not before having a bust up with S8n. Darff and Storm had some kind of a row which neither of them can remember the cause of and stopped talking to each other. T-Bod got into Q2CTF and later became a musician (you can buy his work, by Jeremy Warmsley, in most UK music stores) but never went to Asia, actually. Sozo got into Q3CTF and joined some top class clans. Darff went to uni and found out he was all about Ultimate Frisbee, but still plays QW (and can be found on QuakeNet IRC, #quake.uk). Nuggy I think went the Q3 way too, or perhaps to real life, Soul99 to Action Quake 2 (or maybe he came from there & went elsewhere), and as this was all happening LoC was feeling the drain, tried to merge with Vanish's LCS clan, saw a brief revival under the original LoC name, and then laid to rest at some point in late 1999 I think, always to be remembered fondly in our hearts.