Okay, long and very silly story incoming. 2002, I'm 9. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos comes out. I was too young to understand the depth of RTS games, though I found a custom map "War Chasers" that was a kind of RPG where you pick one hero and beat a bunch of creeps, level up, gather items, etc - it was a sample map for Warcraft very powerful map editor. One of the characters was called Optimus Prime and he had goblin shredder character model. It was the first character I managed to beat the map with, at that point I haven't heard anything about Transformers and didn't realise the reference. Soon I started playing Q3 in local internet cafe's and picked Optimus it as my nickname (as many games didn't allow spaces). After a while - internet, but eventually I found out that it's a very popular nickname since it's from Transformers and I couldn't register with it anywhere, on any forums or websites. I resorted to variations like TheOptimus, MrOptimus, MrTheOptimus (my old youtube username), Sumitpo (written backwards). Eventually I came up with Awpteamoose and I liked it. At the moment I didn't disect the word since I wasn't good at English and didn't play CS so I didn't know what "awp" and "moose" mean. That's the story.
A post-soviet ukrainian one? At the moment I was more into this than transformers or comics and my favourite videogame was Quake and it was right after dad bought me a mouse. I never even had a gaming console so NES/SNES/Genesis/PS/etc all went past me.
