Pic of the Day - Archive 4, Team Banzai Group Photos. Options

[Banzai]

Team Banzai Group Photos have been a tradition since before there was a Banzai. We started taking them to commemorate events with a unit called Orion Faction that several of us were members of. When we founded the Institute, it just naturally carried over and we've been doing it ever since.

Enjoy!

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "The 'founding four' at the first ever TB practice on 05MAY2002 - the day we founded the Institute. You'll notice none of us even have TB decals yet, and I wasn't a good enough image-hacker then to fake them and put them on the 'Mechs. The door on the hangar came out nice though. Maybe too nice, since most people don't even see it back there."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "This was taken on the 16th of May. 11 days after we founded the Institute, and we'd already tripled TB's numbers from 4 to 12 - although I think we actually had 13 then. Ghostrider had joined by that point, but couldn't make it to practice that evening. Pretty good pic, but I really screwed it up trying to replace the sky with something that looked a little more realistic and a lot less yellow than the original."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "I don't have any dates on this one, but it's still pretty early-Banzai. Probably July or August 2002. Taken on Scrub, while practicing for a TWL League drop."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "This was actually taken during a TWL League drop on Lunacy, waiting around for the other team to call 'Go'. I'd just finished re-reading Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the title seemed like a natural for this shot. Always liked the way the Banzai logo worked with the sky here."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "Another shot taken during a TWL League drop. This one was on Lakeside in a 'No Respawn FFP-Off' match (God I miss that format) when we were sneaking up that ravine on the western edge of the map. People have a tendency to think that 'The Law of the Jungle' is 'kill or be killed' - but it's not. It's actually a poem by Rudyard Kipling that describes the rules a wolf pack has created to control its members. This may sound silly, but I've always thought it was also a near-perfect guideline for managing a group of online warriors."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "Believe it or not, this image is the origin of the infamous TB catchphase 'Cooler Than You'. I started out with the idea of taking two Atlases and dressing them up in ties, hats and sunglasses so they looked like the Blues Brothers. I never got that to work (the hats were a disaster) so I ended up just taking a group of 'Mechs and putting sunglasses on them. The phrase 'Cooler Than You' just naturally seemed to fit this particular group, and people liked it so much it kind of stuck."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "I might be wrong, but I'm pretty certain this was one of the first Group Shots we took with MW4: Mercs, and only a few of us had it at that point. I did a hideous job with the editing on this one."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "December the 6th, 2002. Mercs was still pretty new, and we were really coming up against the problem of having way too many members to fit into a single server at once. We tried limiting group photos to only those folks who made it to practice, but then we always had full servers for practice and 5 or 6 more people trying to get in - so someone always got left out of the shots."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "Early 2003, I think. Probably February or March. This image came out looking pretty good. I was especially pleased with the modifications I did with the dropship, but we were still facing the problem of too many members for one group photo."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "I still laugh when I look at this one. See... this guy named James the Dark (who later went on to become a TB member) showed up on the Institute forums raving about 'hacked, unrecognizable and undestroyable' 'Mechs that he'd seen on some open server somewhere. We all tried in vain for a few days to figure out what he was talking about, only to have him come back and admit sheepishly that he'd been looking at 'armless Highlanders'. Being Banzai, this just tickled the crap out of us. Also because we're Banzai, we proceeded to run the joke right into the ground."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "July the 13th, 2003. My first crack at 'The Monster' - my long-held dream of making a group photo big enough to get ALL of us in it. It came out OK, but the resolution wasn't adequate for printing purposes, and that's really what I was after."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "This one is the final version of 'The Monster'. (still on sale in the Banzai Institute Gift Shop, by the way) Each 'Mech was a 9MB ultra-high-rez .png file, pasted onto a background that was over 20,000 pixels wide. The final working version of this thing was over 100MB, believe it or not. Took over 2 weeks to make. TB members are starting to ask about making another one, but I'm just not sure I've got it in me to do it again."

[Banzai]

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Image by: Wildcard
Comments: "The most ambitious Banzai group shot we've ever attempted. The image itself was complex, but not all that difficult. The really hard part about this one was badgering 42 people into submitting pictures of themselves that I could actually work with. (with varying degrees of success, obviously) Believe it or not, I'd never realized just how much Team Banzai has grown until I started putting this thing together. There are 42 members in the shot, and at least another 20 members and friends that I wish would have participated. That's pretty amazing when you consider that three short years ago there was nothing but four of us and one half-baked idea."