In 1997, I was 6 years old, my aunt gave me a computer of my own. It was the computer she had at work, but they would get new computers there. It had a massive 407 MB hard drive and the awesome Windows 3.01 installed. After about half a year, she asked me if I wanted to return it so she could give it to a colleague so he could build in a CD-player and install the freshly shipped Windows 98 SE on it (a copy of it, though). I were glad, as I weren't as great in English as I am now (Windows 3.01 wasn't available in Dutch AFAIK, and if it was I still had the English version), at that time. When she returned it, she told me her colleague had installed one small game on it which he liked, and I were alright with that.
The game was called "Jazz Jackrabbit 2", a welcome change in my never-ending Pacman addiction. It had four multiplayer gametypes and as my cousin (he was 5 by then) was sitting next to me I proposed we played "Treasure Hunt". It was getting dark when we finished the levels 5 times or so and we started doing the Race levels, esspecially the fourth one, called "Race Game D" was hard. All multiplayer levels had letters at the end of the name, like "Treausre Hunt A", "Treasure Hunt B" etc.
I am not entirely sure what version I were playing as it clearly said 'Shareware version' on the splash screen, but it did have the same levels as 1.00g/h do. Because it was just a shareware, a year or so later I decided to ask my mum to buy the full version. We went to some stores and, because of complete stupidness, we bought Jazz Jackrabbit CD. It says 'Jazz Jackrabbit 1' and 'BB 008' on the side but somehow I didn't notice. When playing, it turned out to be the game I saw three years earlier on the aforementioned cousin's sister's computer (hehe ) while she was playing the bonus levels with a friend.
A week later we went to visit them. As Jazz Jackrabbit 2 was nowhere to be found in Wassenaar, we tried a shop close to their home. And yay! there I got my copy of Jazz Jackrabbit 2! Including: Jazz Jackrabbit CD (both without a cover image though). Me and my dad (usually not at the same time) played the game a lot, but at some point it got boring. It turned out to have a level editor too, which was very cool to use but somehow I lost all my levels except for my complete edit of Battle1 and my own level Battle4, which I still have and have worked on until late 2006.
In the beginning of 2004, I somehow I got to play it again with a few friends. I were almost 13 years old and some of my classmates laughed at me for playing a bunny game, but still it was fun and I didn't stop. Frequently I played battle games with friends.
One night, I was bored and wanted to try the online mode as the last time I tried was months and months ago (and I couldn't get a list of active games 'somehow'). It turned out I were still unable to get this list and when closing the game again I saw the Jazzjackrabbit.com link. I thought: maybe they have a solution there. Jazzjackrabbit.com didn't work either, though, so I tried Google. Some site named 'Jazz2Online.com' showed up and I tried to see what it could offer me. It had update patches and a registry patch that should get my online playing working again, and it did. I also downloaded the highest rated Battle level pack. It was 'Blade's Battle Pack' and it offered new tilesets as well.
It was the beginning of April, 2005, and not that great weather so I played Jazz Jackrabbit 2 online for a few hours the next day. I saw there was chatting, so I tried some buttons to find out how to chat and at last I figured out I had to press T to chat. I came in a world where people all had two or three (mostly uppercase) letters behind their nicknames and I wondered what they meant, so I asked: "What's TF?", soon followed by GpW. A few levels later I asked "What's CC?", already realising that it was another clan. "a clan, jerry" was the response that came while I were typing "a clan, okay, but what does CC stand for?". "What's CC?" was the very first stupid question I asked on a Jazz2 server and I'll never forget that one. Some people also had colours in their names, and I wondered how they did that. "you can do that with JazzED." "where do I get it?" "J2O". J2O turned out to be the only connection bedween Jazz2 and its players, other than the game itself.
Two weeks later, after hosting my own battle server "World War JJ2" almost each day, suddenly no-one entered my server anymore and I didn't find it on the GIP-list on J2O either. That made me enter the JCF and write my first few posts: it turned out the USA listserver was down and I had to change to the European one (why I were connecting to the USA lists in the first place? God knows). Since then, I've been a pretty active member of the JCF.
Five days later, on my sixth post on the JCF, I got my first moderator edit. "Derby: Filter bypass removal. Allow the filter to do its own work." It was a post in the 1.25 suggestions thread and, as excited as I was about the existance of a 1.20-1.23 update, I asked "Is that [F-word with * on the second letter]ing code released? I can't wait any longer" and it was the half-filtered F-word that got edited out.
On the 2nd of August, 2005, I started RR with Hipper after having played together for some time. That day, we ended up with just the two of us in the InstaGib server I was hosting and at the same time we said "I'm thinking of starting a clan". Since then, I've been pretty much known on the community and thus I don't see a reason to continue my life story Jazz Jackrabbit history. =)