New Twitch Channel and the answer to "What the hell does 'Tahribator' mean?"

Surprise, I just changed my Twitch channel. It's not "rakgitarmen" but "Tahribator" from now on. I think this will prevent many instances of "Who the hell is rakgitarmen and what kind of a silly name is that?". Having my Twitch name matching my in-game name is also another plus of course.

You may think "Tahribator" is no less silly. Let me tell you the story about this. Back in Summer 2012, I was also caught up in the DayZ craziness and between that and my lectures, I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on in the gaming world. Then on reddit, I stumbled upon a gameplay preview from the closed beta of MWO and I must say I wasn't really impressed. The mechs seemed to be floaty, almost absent any weight. On top of that I learned that it was F2P, which gave me the impression that this was an arcade take on MW games. I quickly disregarded it and forgot about it for a couple of months.

Come December, I was having those times where you really feel nostalgic about the games you played when you were a child. Games like Fallout 2, Homeworld and Mechwarrior really had a huge impact on my childhood and I occasionally reinstall them to relive the nostalgia. Well, at that time, it was Mechwarrior's turn. I was watching old intros and gameplays, thinking about downloading that MekTek MW4 release but I kept stumbling upon MWO gameplay on Youtube. After checking a few, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try it out; it was F2P after all. During the registration I wasn't expecting to play this game for long, so I thought I'd take a funny nick fitting to MWO instead of my usual "Rak" or "rakgitarmen".

"Tahribat" is an old Arabic word that somehow made its way into Turkish, which means "To demolish, destroy". It's not used in modern Turkish anymore save for some very formal communications from government institutions, usually describing damage from natural disasters. By adding "-or" into the end I made it into a very silly local version of "Terminator". It sounded funny at the time and maybe a fun way to find other Turkish players playing this game, but I never expected it to stick with me for 1.5 years.

There you go, now the mystery of "Tahribator" is revealed. If you see me on TS Dropships, forget trying to pronounce it but just call me "Tah" or even "Rak" if you know about this blog.

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About Rak

I'm an engineer who likes to write extremely long articles about games that border simulation and mainstream.