Forged in Fire – Chapter Two: Seeds of an Idea – From Waddington to Odiham

“Before Iraq, before funding bids, and long before the Blades were born… there were thrown chairs, busted KD ratios, and a little Xbox in a tea bar that somehow lit the fuse.”

Seeds of an Idea: From Waddington to Odiham

This idea, however, wasn’t a sudden spark in the desert; it had been simmering for years. My second post, at RAF Waddington, saw us finding pure, unadulterated joy in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. We’d tear across the site during lunch and breaks, racing to grab one of the four coveted spots on the Xbox 360 for some glorious split-screen madness in the tea bar. Those ten-minute sessions were pure chaos: screen-watching, rampant swearing, chairs getting thrown – it was all going on. I distinctly remember a match on Rust, supposedly throwing knives and pistols only, until someone loaded in with an M60 and peppered our resident “live wire” into reacting by hurling chairs across the tea bar, demanding to know who was mowing him down with a machine gun. Needless to say, that was absolutely hilarious.

Around that time, while I was living at RAF Scampton (whilst posted at RAF Waddington due to a lack of accommodation for me and my family), there was talk of a LAN club. I tried desperately to get involved, but it sadly collapsed after only about two weeks – there just wasn’t the interest. The problem was that RAF Scampton was going through a phase of remaining open then closing, and with every cycle the station’s population got smaller and smaller. I really yearned to be part of something like that, but I simply didn’t have the confidence to drive it back then. Inevitably, I gravitated towards football coaching instead, with a view to working with kids. I even went to RAF Brize Norton and completed my Level 1 Coaching course – genuinely good fun. But before I could put it to use, I was sent away on Op. HERRICK to Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, my first deployment with the Chinooks, those “green goddesses.” While out there, I found out I’d been promoted and was subsequently posted to RAF Odiham when I returned. The football coaching dream was put on hold as I had to learn my new role, and the esports dream was nowhere on the radar.

My new home at Odiham was the Aircraft Weapons Bay. The bay itself was fiercely divided between PlayStation and Xbox players – cross-play wasn’t even a concept then, and the next generation of consoles was just on the horizon. I was blessed, though, because the bay was teeming with gamers, and there was a key trio of us who were firmly on PlayStation. As the new console details began to leak, the PS4 versus Xbox debates became rife. Microsoft, frankly, did themselves pretty dirty during that launch phase, and our core gaming group of about six of us collectively decided to transition to PS4. We cut our teeth on CoD Ghosts, forming an elite team we called ‘the Black Ops’, then moved through Advanced Warfare and eventually CoD 4 Remastered. Our focus was always those brutal Kill Death ratios in Domination, with objectives often ignored – a true badge of honor. But the game that truly defined life for us at this time was Destiny.

Next time on Forged in Fire…

We take on Destiny — literally.

Chapter Three: Guardians of the Bay follows our jump to the PS4, the formation of our tight-knit fire-team, and how hours of raids, strikes, and banter would quietly forge a team dynamic that would one day power the very heart of the Odiham Blades.