For me, it all started April 30th, 2020.

COVID had just put everything into lockdown. I had recently finished college and all of a sudden I had nothing to do, so I had bought a Quest 1 about a week earlier to pass the time.

I had always wanted to try virtual reality. I had been watching content creators use VR for years and it fascinated me. Somebody I knew had a Rift S, so I started looking for something we could play together.

There weren't that many crossplay VR games back then. It was mostly just VRChat and Rec Room.

That morning, I came across the Alpha 5 trailer for a game called Hyper Dash. The trailer had just been released on YouTube. I watched it and my first thought was that it looked awful.

But I was desperate for something to play, so we tried it anyway.

Something About It

Hyper Dash was a really simple game. It was basically a 5v5 VR arena shooter. There were weapons around the map you could pick up to fight the other team, and would either push/stop the cart on the payload gamemode or capture points on domination.

There wasn't a ton to it on the surface, but the dashing mechanic, the rail grinding, the fact that it was a VR game, and just everything else about it made it feel different from anything I had played before.

Everything was fast. You were constantly moving and getting into fights that were over almost as quickly as they started.

It was easy to understand, but there was clearly a lot of room to get better at it.

More than anything, it was just satisfying. Everything felt good. It wasn't something I immediately thought was amazing, but there was something about actually playing it that made me want to play another match.

But I was the only one who liked it.

So the next day, I came back by myself.

And then I just kept coming back again and again.

Learning From Pubs

At the time, I was learning entirely from pubs (public games) and the better players I played against.

Players like Despair who were clearly better than me. I played against Despair only a few days after I started and said afterward that one game against him had been enough to destroy my ego.

Then there were players like Maniacal and Inepticom whose movement I tried to copy. They were very fast dashers, and running into them made me realize how much the game was about movement rather than aim.

I wasn't very good at aiming anyway, so that playstyle suited me.

I played aggressively, tried to get close to people, and just relied a lot on movement.

Yellow was another player I saw a lot. He started playing around the same time as me, maybe a little later, and was around my level. The biggest difference was that his playstyle relied much more on sprint.

At the time, I thought sprint was basically useless. I stopped using it almost immediately after I started playing. In my opinion, dashing was also what made Hyper Dash interesting.

Sprint was actually a new mechanic released in Alpha 5. It was very controversial at the time. A lot of players thought it took away from the importance of dashing. Instead of having to carefully use the few dashes you had to outplay someone, sprint would just let you strafe to dodge shots easily. The best players I was trying to imitate were good without relying on sprint, so it made my opinion about it stronger.

The Beginning of Competition

Over the following weeks, I started getting better. Good enough that people began noticing me in pubs and asking me to join their clans or Dash League teams.

Dash League was a community-run competitive league for the game that a player named Lateralus had begun organizing.

Dash League was only just beginning at the time with Season 0, basically a test season.

This was the first league for the game. There was no established competitive scene, no years of team history, and no blueprint for what competitive Hyper Dash was supposed to look like.

The people involved were basically figuring it out as they went.

But I wasn't interested in being part of it.

Competition had never really been my thing. I never cared much about sports, competitive shooters, MOBAs, or really anything built around seriously competing against other people.

I also didn't have the best experience with competitive things growing up, and over time I think I developed a pretty negative view of it. Sometimes it just seemed too serious, too toxic. That was all I understood from it.

I still liked getting good at things, but because of that, actually competing just felt different and somewhat intimidating.

So I kept turning the offers down.

By June people were publicly wondering why I still hadn't joined a clan or a team.

As far as I was concerned, I wasn't going to have anything to do with the competitive side of the game.

My First Tournament

Then... toward the end of June, on a whim, I decided to give it a try in a small tournament.

There was a deathmatch tournament being held, so I signed up.

It wasn't much, so if I were to try anything like it, it was the perfect occasion.

Somehow, I made it all the way to the finals as the only player there without a clan or team.

I was just a pub player who had gotten pretty good at the game.

I lost.

The finals were played over two rounds, with the winner decided by total kills across both rounds. The recording for the first round is available here

And instead of making me want to compete more, it mostly frustrated me. Deathmatch could be very chaotic and random at times, and losing that way didn't feel great.

Not long after, I got bored with Hyper Dash altogether.

By July, I stopped playing.

For about a month and a half, that could have been the entire story.

But eventually, I felt like coming back to play a little bit.

9V

Around the time I returned, Hyper Dash's biggest clan, 4D, had just died.

Its owner, OddLeviathan, wanted to focus on his Dash League team instead, leaving a lot of its old players without a clan.

A player named Quadd had been helping revive an older clan called 9V, one that had existed before but had never really taken off.

It became somewhere for some of the former 4D players, and eventually many other players, to go.

Quadd invited me to join.

I wasn't convinced.

But he told me one thing that stuck with me.

He saw clans as something that could be good for the community. His argument was that if newer players entered a lobby and saw somebody strong, but also well-behaved, dominating games, they might want to become like that person.

Being good at the game gave you influence, and that influence could be a positive thing.

Hyper Dash wasn't my first experience with a small online game community.

Not too long ago, I had spent a lot of time on ClassiCube, an open-source recreation of Minecraft Classic. I made mods for it, ran my own server and became involved in its community.

I already knew how much these small communities could be shaped by the people who cared enough to contribute to them.

The difference was that over there, I contributed by making things. But here, I hadn't really thought about contributing at all. I was just playing the game and happened to be getting good at it.

I think that's why Quadd's argument picked my interest.

This was probably the first time someone made me think about what being good at something could mean to the people around you.

Maybe being somebody people recognized and setting the example was its own small way of contributing.

Maybe there was even more to it.

It was a convincing argument, and I also thought it was time for me to try something new.

So I decided to accept the offer and join 9V.

I didn't know it at the time, but that decision would eventually pull me into exactly the part of Hyper Dash I spent my first few months avoiding.