In 1997, at the age of 10, my parents only allowed me to have an hour and a half of internet time a day, so as to not monopolize the phone line. I think maybe we were paying hourly rates to our ISP too? Despite this, I managed to be pretty active on a few forums, via the archiving feature of Internet Explorer. I would download all the posts for a day and read them once I was offline, formulating my replies then and posting them the next day when I'd get back on. I was even a moderator for one of them, the forums at CMGSCCC.com, an independent website dedicated to Game Shark / Game Genie hacking. That site ended up getting bought out by the Code Breaker people, and was converted to being the main web presence for Code Breaker. Code Master, the guy that ran CMGSCCC, ended up getting gored by Code Breaker I think.
After that particular obsession, I ended up in 1998/1999 getting into WWF wrestling, and joined a few EZBoard
e-federations, roleplaying websites dedicated to fantasy wrestling. Bookers set up matches for players, who wrote pre-match speeches for their characters. Whoever wrote the best speech before the match won the match. All done via text. Basically the gayest form of creative writing ever invented.
Then in 1999 EverQuest came out, and my new obsession was formed. I spent most of my 1.5 hours of internet time researching the game, and the other 22.5 hours of the day trying to convince them that paying $15 a month for a game you already bought wasn't a rip-off. They finally caved Christmas of that year. I was grounded for some reason, tho, and wasn't able to start my first EQ account til January 6th, 2000 (you used to be able to look up the date on their website, but no more since DBG acquired them.)
My EverQuest addiction ended up being what caused me to convince my parents to get a second phone line so I could play more than 1.5 hours a day. I explained to them that 1.5 hours simply wasn't long enough in a game where you often didn't even get your group started for an hour. They somehow budged and obliged!
Then my sister convinced them to let her have her own phone in her bedroom hooked up to the second phone line. She used the added privacy to be sneaky and stay in touch with shady older boys, leading to her abortion in 2001.
TL;Dr my EQ addiction led to my sister's abortion, and I should have stuck to gay sports entertainment creative writing roleplay.