I had been a fan of speed runs of various games already starting in ~2003. I had seen the original Morimoto TAS from Kazaa in 2003, though I didn't know it was tool-assisted. I just thought whoever was playing was ridiculously good, for years. I had seen unassisted speed runs that were roughly as good, like Mega Man X done with only the blaster, etc.
Eventually, I saw a few Sonic 2 TASes which I also thought were unassisted since I didn't know about TASing. They were nonsensically fast, and I did some more research and learned more about the wider TASing community, especially at TASvideos, then. This was in 2004, though I was only an unregistered forum lurker at that time.
I have been deep into the Worms Armageddon community since 1999. In the mean time, Deadcode from the Worms Armageddon community independently wrote tools for a private build of Worms Armageddon. He had been given the game's source code by the development company, Team17, in order to maintain it. I hadn't put together immediately that Deadcode's single step, frame advance, and other tools were essentially the same system (though more advanced in a few ways) used by console TASers. He hadn't heard of console TASing when he wrote those tools.
It excited me that Deadcode had independently programmed TASing tools, so I had to share his triumph with the world, and the pride I had for my "home" community of Worms Armageddon, so I registered and ended up writing this thread:
http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5736.
