We can all be elite
A middle school friend of mine—part of my computer game-sharing club, with a big personality but not a single underground bone in his body—somehow socially engineered his way into an invitation to our area code's premiere underground computer art BBS, Digital Holocaust, the world headquarters of New Wave Artists, abbreviated NWA after some more credibly and authentically tough phenomenon taking place further south along the West Coast. Obtaining its phone number was necessary, but far from sufficient to gain access to such an elite hub.
Prospective users were often prompted for the NUP (New User Password), which was regularly changed before they could even begin requesting an account on the system. Other times, they were required to demonstrate their underground credentials by successfully unpacking a series of cryptic abbreviations representing elite underground crews. For example, "TRSI" stood for "TriStar & Red Sector, Incorporated," "THG" was short for "The Humble Guys" (the original humblebrag), and "ACiD" referred to "ANSI Creations in Demand."
Sometimes, even after overcoming all of these hurdles, petitioners for new accounts would then be subject to NUV, "New User Voting", where a jury of your supposed peers, already with accounts on the desired system, would weigh over your potential contributions to their milieu vs. the drag factor of lamers whose main footprint would be tying up the BBS' phone line. Then came the verdict: thumbs-up or thumbs-down..
Against all these odds, somehow my friend Creideiki made it through the gauntlet. He proclaimed,
"Follow me, everybody, our warez problems are solved. I’ve figured out how we can all be elite."
Naturally, we wanted to know how he ever got past the front door of the cybercrime clubhouse in the first place and he told us,
"Simple. I told them I wanted to draw ANSI art for their crew."
"But there's a problem," we reminded him. “You’ve never drawn anything in your life. It won’t take long for them to figure that out.”
"How hard can it be?" he pondered.
(Spoiler: as with many creative endeavors, it's easy for an unseasoned hand to do poorly and difficult for them to do well.) I followed the trail he blazed, aspirationally claiming to be a composer of kick-ass computer music (a direction I'd hoped to travel in with a decade of piano lessons under my belt, and excellent incentive to learn!). But when no block-rocking Amiga Protracker .MODule music emerged from my wishful thinking (in my defense, the KingMOD sheet music-style program I was relying on, thinking I could avoid the necessity of learning to count in hex, basically had training wheels on and was fundamentally unsuitable for any serious composition purposes), I fell back on the same lie that I, too, had sincere intentions to draw amazing ANSI art screens for their crew.
Not only did I lack any aptitude for this pursuit, but I didn't even have any remotely applicable reference material at hand to get the job done. At the time, underground ANSIs were being drawn in the style of the founding artists of the emerging Image Comics collective — the underpaid top-tier Marvel Comics illustrators fed up with surrendering ownership of their work. Meanwhile, all of the comic books I had access to were 15 to 20 years old and painfully mainstream. You were never going to be effectively promoting anything underground by adapting panels from old Archie digests! Because I was a weird kid, I took a crack at impressing them by adapting some esoteric occult imagery — but we were not on the same wavelength. And besides, my adaptation was wretched.
Charitably, they gave me one last chance to prove I could run with the pack. Riding the momentum of a recent high school English assignment, where I’d improvised some rhyming doggerel, I tried my hand at composing some “lit”. Rhyming and counting metrical feet came easily enough, but the real challenge was finding an underground BBS whose name struck the right balance of mature grimness without going over the top. I was never quite bold enough to try to grapple with Digital Holocaust. The administration of NWA—referred to as the "Senior Staff"—was satisfied that, given my persistence, I would eventually start turning out poems worthy of inclusion in their art releases. And so, I was added to the roster of regular members. However, before I had the chance to have a submission published in one of their artpacks, NWA merged with GRiP/AD (Graphic Revolution in Progress, Art Division), a crew of kindred spirits based in Quebec City's 418 area code. The newly formed group was dubbed iMPERiAL. (It's hard to explain, but stylistically, consistent emphasis on the lower-case letter "i" was considered an essential ingredient of the milieu's flavor.)
For five months in mid-1994, two regional virtual communities of underground digital artists—one based in area code 604, the other in 418—pooled their creations from opposite ends of Canada and yielded respectable artpacks. However, the two scenes were never truly integrated. The lack of Internet access (a microcosm of the national situation at that time that none of us had the wider context to fully grasp) and the high cost of long-distance phone service doomed the group to operate as two solitudes: each group hobnobbed with its own local underground BBS ecosystem, only ever touching base presumably during pricey once-monthly connections to consolidate the submissions and hammer out the content of the jointly-created infofiles. It wasn't sustainable. Shortly after their fifth joint artpack release, iMPERiAL officially ceased operations. This stunned and disoriented its Quebec contingent for a while, though they eventually reformed GRiP/AD and went on to enjoy a third act in 1995 that was just as long and fruitful as their pre-iMPERiAL era. For the underground computer artists of area code 604, however, the story unfolded quite differently.