Grandpa Chuck's Playground

[mintclad]

Hi, I've never gotten too deep into source ports and custom WADs, but my friend and I had a "LAN party" in 2013 where we both installed Odamex and played a tiny bit of deathmatch and a lot of co-op with the two of us and whoever randomly joined our server (whichever one of us happened to be hosting). In Odamex, when you highlighted a server in the browser it would obviously show a bunch of info about the server.

 

One of the data points it would show was the URL for where the server was hosted, and I'll never forget just randomly clicking through and seeing a server hosted at a URL called http://grandpachuck.org. I saw that and my mind was pretty blown. And in my disbelief, all I could do was look at my friend and say "dude....... look at this server's URL! It's freaking grandpachuck.org!!!!!!!!!"

 

And we had a really good laugh. And even though I understood the danger at hand, I ended up visiting grandpachuck.org into my web browser just to sate my morbid curiosity. What I found was something that was not f*cked up at all—but rather somewhat wholesome. It was a(n old) dude hosting a Doom server from the back of his retro van parked out in the woods!

The URL/server now seems to be down, but at the time this felt like discovering one of the deepest and most authentic corners of the internet. The text on the page read:

Quote

Come play with Grandpa Chuck!

Grandpa Chuck's Playground is a collection of game servers for the Doom open-source port Odamex. Located somewhere in Northern California in the back of a rusted Chevy van nicknamed The Hammer™, the servers are administered by Grandpa Chuck himself or one of his court-appointed wards.

 

Further below, it showed a list of the current servers being hosted, with pictures of the maps available

 

As the URL is currently throwing a "403 forbidden" error when visited from a browser, the only way to see the facade of yore is via the Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/20230609182955/http://grandpachuck.org/

 

So my question, and the reason why I posted this, is does anyone know Grandpa Chuck personally or has interacted with him online? Chuck III, are you a Doom fan bro? And if so, what can you tell us about your grandpa? We don't deserve him, but he's provided a platform for a lot of people to have a lot of fun! To anyone who knows him, how's his health? What's happened to The Hammer? And also normal users who may not know Grandpa Chuck personally, have you ever come across his servers/site, and what was your experience? And how did you react?

 

Thanks for reading everyone! This post was mainly made to highlight something really cool I found a long time ago, but also to hear other folks' experiences with these servers. Peace!

[TheGreenZap]

I don't know anything about Grandpa Chuck, but I just wanted to post and say this is awesome!

 

[Charbomber]

This sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would've loved stumbling upon randomly. I'm so glad you've shared this.