The Sundown Saints – Quick and Dirty Clan History

The Sundown Saints began life as a Planetside clan.  We were known as A New Dawn in those days, and most of us met over IRC.  The clan was initially started by a British gent known to us only as Shiver.  He had a wicked accent, and a horrendous drinking problem.  To be completely honest, none of us have any real idea where he’s gone, or why he left in the first place.  He simply disappeared a couple of months before the game was released, and we never saw him again.  Aside from the slight setback, those of us that had originally joined the clan restructured ourselves, and continued on.  It was in the months between Christmas of 2002 and May of 2003 that the core members of the Saints formed an unbreakable bond.

We played all sorts of games while we waited for Planetside to release, the most prominent being Battlefield 1942.  We only played for fun, but the games that we did play brought us together as a team.  It’s what we hoped would prepare us for what we anticipated to be a highly-involved team-oriented game.  We were right in one respect, it did prepare us for a team-centric game, but the game we were all waiting for wasn’t that game.

Planetside came and went, and we all played for a few months before succumbing to the amount of suck that the game emitted on an hourly basis.  As with any SOE released game up to this point, Planetside was riddled with bugs and imbalances that severely retracted from its potential as a solid game.  Though it did manage to dash our hopes and dreams of the perfect online multiplayer game, it didn’t succeed in breaking our team apart.  We instantly picked ourselves up and moved on to greener pastures.

A few of our members were accepted into the Star Wars: Galaxies closed beta test and would occasionally go off into a separate TeamSpeak channel and play.  The rest of us slowly trickled in to listen to their exploits, and our fancies became tickled.  The interest we developed snowballed into full-scale anticipation, and lucky for us the game was only a few short weeks away from release.  Most of our members preordered and received their copies on launch day.

Star Wars: Galaxies was our longest and most involved endeavor in our history.  We stuck with it for nearly a year before the SOE virus took its toll.  We succeeded in creating the largest and most diverse guild on our server, boasting nearly 200 members at our peak.  We were among the first to participate in the GCW, and once player cities were finally put into the game, our city was the first to upgrade into a Metropolis.

Sadly, the end of our playtime in Star Wars: Galaxies marked our first major split in the guild.  Leadership squabbles led all of the core members to quit the guild outright.  This is when we first became the Sundown Saints.  The new guild only lasted a month or so in SWG before we abandoned our accounts.  For the first time in nearly two years, the members of the Saints had no game to look forward to, and very few games to play on the side.  The period after we had quit SWG was our most dormant period.

The horizon was not black for long however, as World of Warcraft began to take shape and grabbed our attention.  It was a long wait for WoW, however, as the closed beta was still half a year out at that point.  Our team made it through, however, and eventually we began to trickle into the beta.  In order to keep the boredom to a minimum, I won’t get into the bumpy history that our guild went through during WoW.  I will say this, however, WoW marked the second great schism in the guild.  As a group we have a habit of growing extremely large within games, and inevitably the core members break off to go on new adventures.

We’ve learned much from our experiences, and have adopted recruiting policies and evaluation tactics to ensure that our core principles stay in tact for future games.  We rely on friendship and loyalty to keep the clan in tact, and as such have an extremely strenuous recruitment process.  We don’t add new members to the clan on a whim, and each new recruit must be accepted by all members of the clan in order to be fully inducted.  We’re tight-knit and passionate about the games we play, and we’ll be bringing that fire to Tabula Rasa.