smr

SMR is more than a clan. It's a group of people united by a common background (TFC), but still together because of something much stronger than a game (not gay). Now, this is pretty long as it's basically just the history of SMR. Unless you are an SMR member, or just really interested for some reason, I don't really expect you to want to read this. But, hey, be my guest... 1999 In the Beginning... SMR started out as simply a search tag. That is, a few people who knew each other decided to throw the SMR tag on so it would be easier to find each other when searching using GameSpy 3D's player search feature. The original three members were Evil Santa, Mal, and Gremlin, although he actually joined last. The IRC chat log we had suggested that they recruited him in a random TFC pub. At any rate, it is pretty well agreed upon that SMR became a clan in April 1999. Our first match, according to Konspiracy, was on August 13th 1999 against CA - Cogent Alliance. SMR won 300-30. After this, our records start to become a little fuzzy. The chat log we had suggests that SMR was at one time on the "top of the leagues," but the Konspiracy match history does not really reflect that. Whether or not SMR was towards the top before Konspiracy's records or was just up there for a short period of time is somewhat uncertain. 2000 Tough Times Towards the end of 2000 SMR was cruising along in league play until something--something that is usually an afterthought in online gaming--derailed everything. SMRGremlin-666, the clan leader, was killed in a motorcycle accident in California. At the time, Gremlin was essentially the heart and soul of SMR, and needless to say his death hit everybody hard. Today, mono's screenshot of #smr after Gremlin's death serves as a reminder of how pathetic and immature people can be on the internet (somebody named 'Twiz' impersonated Gremlin). You'll also see here where the -666 tag (and the +l 666 mode we have in our channels) comes from--look at TeamPlaya's explanation towards the top. From what I've been told, after the death people had a hard time getting back to TFC. Combined with that and the TFC 1.5 patch, SMR pretty much fell apart and then into SMRPhoenix's hands. Our Konspiracy records show that SMR did continue in 9v9 play until May 2001, but they are certainly not pretty records. There's an awful lot of red there for STA Bronze. 2001 Rebuilding Due to the troubles the clan faced (such as the inability to field 9 on a consistant basis), SMR joined 5v5 leagues sometime in late May 2001. While there were not a lot of active members, the ones that did usually make up the core--Garoun (BlazeWolfe), Phoenix (SheWolfe), mono, NyteSnyper, UberSprite, Soup--kept the team afloat and highly competitive. I (Niaad) joined in late June 2001; MrMagoo (Cynnik) also joined right about that time as well. At the time, we competed in OGL 5v5 and were in the top 15 rungs. We were also in STA Silver and had a winning record. It certainly was not anything spectacular, but it was not bad for us. 2001 We Want 9v9! As time wore on though, it became apparent most good 5v5 clans were nothing but "mutt" clans, which meant they were basically made up of the best players from the best 9v9 clans. This also meant most people did not take 5v5 very seriously. So, as SMR recruited more (Kly joined in August, NuclearMonkey joined in October I believe), we started scrimming other clans in 9v9 and eventually decided to join EGL (now dead) and OGL 9v9. We won the EGL championship (har), but then lost it to (!) - Omnipotence. We continued 9v9 play into December, but then we were suddenly notified by SMRPhoenix (our leader at the time), that she was going to retire from TFC and probably not be around much anymore. After a brief period of turmoil and inactivity, SMRSoup was crowned the new leader and we decided to drop all other leagues (OGL 5v5, OGL 9v9) and join TFL 4a. Soup really did not have much time on his hands though, so leadership was transferred to NuclearMonkey. 2002 We'll Win in TFL One of These Days...! Despite our high hopes, we had quite a hard time in TFL 4a our first season. Maybe it was the fact we were lucky if we could field 9 in a match (and even luckier if we could in practice), or just the fact we sucked; regardless, we ended up something like 2-6 at the end of our first season. Realizing we needed to rebuild a little bit before we ventured on in TFL, we dropped out of 9v9 completely and just focused on CoC 5v5. We managed to even lose our first CoC match, but later got things together and ended up losing in the CoC championship match that season. The following season we lost in the semi-finals match (to the same opponent), and CoC then renamed itself to UGC. Finally, by summer 2002, we felt as if we were ready to rejoin TFL. So began another round of good times. 2002 The Summer of ... Winning?! Although we actually lost our first match back in TFL to tM, we quickly rebounded and cruised through 4a that summer, compiling a winning record. We made the playoffs thanks to a nice, long win streak that stretched through the dog days of summer and managed to defeat tHoL on cz, which many members consider the best TFC match they ever played in. Round 1 was extremely close, and although round 2 was a little more of a blowout, it was still a blast. Sadly, the summer came to an end and so did our period of fortune. While I cannot remember exactly why things started to go bad, I do remember us not really doing anything after August ended. We continued to play (and win) in UGC, but 9v9 was once again not looking good. 2002 TAU| - Texas Area Untouchables TAU is a good Counter-Strike clan that was (or is, not really sure) in CAL-I. One of their original members was an SMR member (TAU|SolarCurve, aka SMRLiquidRevenge); he came to us in October 2002 with an interesting proposition. SMR at the time was going through rough times, and he asked us if we wanted to become the TFC division of TAU. We accepted and a few TAU-CS players (formerly TFC players) joined, although only one really stood--JoeBob (JB). With the new name, we were able to recruit a little bit easier and long time white nerd emo joined during this time. We played our first TFL 4a match on 10-31-2002 as TAU, and did quite well that season. 2003 Moving On Up Right at the start of 2003, I went inactive thanks to a gay Junior-year (of High School) schedule. Of course the clan rolled on anyway, and played in both TFL 9v9 and STA 9v9 (and we were still in UGC 5v5 as SMR, but we stopped in April). We were in TFL 2a from January 2003 to June 2003, and despite piling up some losses, we gained valuable experience. Originally we were in STA Gold, but then we moved to Silver after getting our asses handed to us, which, well, builds character. TAU trucked on into the summer until we decided TFL's lousy admins and new rules like "you can't have Half-Life installed" and "you can't use a mouse" made it a pretty shitty league. Our core players of the time--NuclearMonkey, mono, and look--led us to our first real championship: the STA Silver championship on 7-21-2003 (against PoW). Afterwards we dropped TFL, moved to STA Gold, and joined IGLQ. 2003 Top 35! Despite not doing all that well in IGLQ, TAU was able to win quite consistantly in STA Gold. Our successful season lead to another championship, this time in STA Gold (on 10-13-2003, nearly a year after TAU was formed). All of this winning led to us begin ranked in the top 35 of Konspiracy's "Active Stocks" list, which, if you've been reading this whole thing, was no small accomplishment for us. We emerged from countless setbacks and losing streaks over all of these years to finally become a dominant clan in the TFC community. Unfortunately, after all of this success, our interest in TFC simply began to die out. TAU played its last match December 1st 2003. We took that month off, and although there was minor discussion about possibly resuming play after Christmas break, it was decided that nobody really wanted to anymore. 2004 Still Alive Despite not playing TFC anymore, SMR (which has now adopted all TAU-TFC members, basically) is still alive and well. Our private channel, #smrpriv, has anywhere between 15-20 people in it, usually. All throughout our TFC career we always believed one of our strengths was the fact that we did not simply talk about TFC 24/7 in #smrpriv (mostly other games actually) and more importantly because of that we knew how to take a loss. That somewhat unique quality had another benefit then after we stopped playing TFC--from Final Fantasy XI to Unreal Tournament 2004, our members play a wide variety of games now and more importantly we play them together. Now, we don't ALL play UT2004 or FFXI, but small groups do, and the friendship between these groups keeps the entire clan together as a whole. So are we still a clan? Not really. What's the purpose of this website then? I don't really know; I figured SMR was still something, and that something deserved a website. And, hey, what does SMR mean? Secret.