Username Origins

Enough people have asked me about my username now that I might as well make a post about it. It is, after all, pretty unconventional.

The origins for these kinds of things are usually a special little story for everyone. I encourage you to go around asking your friends how they came to name themselves on the internet. Somehow my name has a page-and-a-half of backstory to it.

In case you didn’t run across it earlier, the username I go with on the internet is Lion4567714. Hi.

Fight My Monster

I first became interested in video games by watching my mom play solitaire on our old cabinet computer. Sometime after that, I discovered the existence of online flash games, and I eventually came across this little website called Fight My Monster. How? No clue. Big mystery.

Anyway, Fight My Monster was a web game where you could collect Monsters. Each monster has some stats, and you could train and battle them against other player’s monsters to make them stronger. Pokemon-style, if you like.

The outcome of each battle was determined purely by random chance, but if your monster was stronger than your opponent’s, your chance of winning was greater (but never quite 100%…). There was a big spinner that determined what happened. If you won, I believe you had the choice of gaining xp for your monster or capturing or killing your opponent’s monster.

I trained my monster up for some time. I had other monsters, but there was one that was bigger and stronger than the rest and was very special to me as a little kid. It might have been the first monster I was given. Don’t get me wrong, my best monster was nowhere near the best in the world, but it was still significantly strong.

Tragedy

One day tragedy struck. I was fighting my main monster with some other much weaker monster. I finally got unlucky and lost (with a 98%+ chance of winning, mind you), and I got my best monster captured. The worst part was that I knew this other monster was just some garbage someone threw out there to test the waters against bigger monsters. They took a stupid gamble and I lost. Couldn’t bring myself to play the game again.

Perhaps this is also the origin story for why I prefer skill-based games and why I’m a bit of a sore loser…

Huh? Oh right, my username

I’m horrible at naming things now, and I was horrible at naming things back then too. I tried to come up with ideas like some of my favorite things. Can you guess what my favorite animal was?

Obviously that name was taken, so the website gave me some alternatives. Somehow it came up with “Lion4567714” as the next logical choice after “Lion”. Cool.

So here I am. Name never changed. I’ll use just “Lion” when I can, but numbers give me the added benefit of having no username registry with my name taken before I get there!

What about Fight My Monster? Ever go back?

Nope. Unfortunately, the game disappeared off the face of the internet since then. Of all of this, that’s the real tragedy. Apparently there’s still a subreddit dedicated in its memory, but that is about it.

Thanks for reading.

…

(First post of the new year! Wooo!)