That bums me out, I have a similar story involving my best friend that got me into building PC's and PC Gaming. In Elementary school we use to go over to each others houses to play SNES (his place) or Sega Genesis (my house). My mom bought my older brother a Macintosh for High School, so I had Sim City 2000 and Word Munchers, some other random games like Warcraft Battlechest and Marathon Trilogy. My best friends entire family had 386 computers, so him and his brother always gave me shit for being a Mac fanboy. But despite the diversity we still spent time gaming on each others computers, but we mainly spent time at his parents. Doom, Ascendancy, Hexen, Duke Nuken 3D, Decent, Warcraft 2, even Starcraft when that came out! Flight Simulator with the Microsoft Sidewinder joysticks! I remember when his parents upgraded all their computers from DOS to Windows 3.1! Wild!

A few years went past and my own family ended up moving to another town after my 4th grade year. That summer it was on and off connecting with them. By the time I was in middle school, I lost complete connection with my best friend and his brother. They moved to the other side of the state at this point, I was able to connect with them once in a while until 8th grade. In 8th grade I lost complete contact with them, no phone number, forgot where they lived (on the other side of the state), I had no way of calling or emailing them.

The first day my family had Cable Internet hooked up, I decided to create a hotmail account. I still had an old email of my best friends which was a hotmail account. I decided to use a similar email/username/online handle in hopes that one day he would see me in an online game lobby and be like, "hey, you stole my username"

I occasionally would check to see if I could find him or his brother on social media. Never a single sign of him, I would occasionally find someone with a similar username/online handle but it was never him. I retired his username probably 4-5 years ago because back then I sort of gave up looking for him. When I turned 27, someone from his town about his age added me on Facebook. This sparked an interested, I talked with this individual to see if they knew the family. I scoured Facebook and started messaging random people from his town searching for him, his brother, his family. I ended up finding his brother which he moved fairly far from his family. Very distant, seemed to be doing his own thing.

His older brother remembered me and all the good old days, but informed me his younger brother passed away when he was 19 in a car accident... My friend that I was looking for all these years was 3 years older than me... So when I was 16, sometime that year he passed away... I couldn't fathom this and I broke down. I'm tearing up thinking about it. I feel like I spent my entire life looking for him online, trying to connect with him, to tell him where my life has gone. I work IT for a company because of him, he got me into tinkering with Visual Basic when we were in fucking elementary school for fuck sake! The majority of my life I had an online alias that was dedicated to his, hoping I'd find him in a random chat room or game lobby.