Man. I need to find some motivation somehow.
At the time I got my first kill screen on December 28th 2011, I believed I was the 23rd to do it. (In reality I was 30-somethingth, but I didn't know that because I was going by the TG boards, which were missing a bunch).
Getting a kill screen was a lot more interesting to me on the day that I did it. It felt like a bigger achievement.
Back then, the prospect of going for a million was downright exciting. As of that date, only six players had broken a million, and three of them did it in MAME. I thought, "wow, if I get an arcade machine and do this, I could be the fourth!" I started looking for one, and found it pretty quick.
My timing for making a run at this game really couldn't have been worse.
Two days after I got my kill screen and started considering the push for a million (12/30/11), Dave got it.
And then the floodgates opened!
Now, a year and a half later, we're pushing two dozen million-point players, and the kill screeners list has almost doubled since I got onto it.
As things stand now, I'm twice as good a player as I was in 12/11, but I have about a tenth of the motivation. I just don't have the fire anymore. I go for three to four month stretches without touching the game, and when I finally flop onto that stool, I play shittily and sloppily and don't really try.
I felt pretty puffed up at the end of 2011, but nowadays I'm sucking hind tit and I know it. I can't keep up with you monsters!
It's interesting to think that if I'd started playing a year earlier, everything would have been different. I very well might have been the fourth or fifth arcade million (I would have been trying a lot harder to improve and make attempts), and it would have been a biggish deal when I got it, qualifying me for KO2. Now, when it comes, it'll just be a "me too," underneath a stack of other millions, and won't qualify me for jack.
Personally, a goal becomes less and less attractive to me the more people that have achieved it, whereas others seem to thrive in a more pressure cooker-type environment.
So, I'm curious: does the fact that so many more big scores are going up nowadays make the rest of you want to try harder, or, like me, just wanna say "meh, whatever"?
Judging by the last year and a half, it seems to be the former. Though, obviously, qualifying for the Kong Offs is a major factor in all this.
Having said all this, if I had to choose between having a big score on a smaller leaderboard (which didn't happen), or the increase in the community's size and vibrancy (which did happen), I'd take the community in a second. I'm happy with how it turned out. The community is proving to be more of a reward to me than the game ever was.
