Had a similar experience. I was a complete addict in High School to late 90's Everquest. I believe the project was EQEmu and I was able to spin up a local SQL server and run my own private server. I had no idea what I was doing at the time but I got it to work and was able to have friends join me...over my dialup connection. Unreal at the time :)

Ultima Online?

Nope, was involved in the MapleStory private server scene.

OdinMS was such a fun time. I too started programming MapleStory private servers. Vana was my intro to C++ and as I learned in Uni it made it so much more fun.

That and Minecraft modding with hMod and Bukkit.

If you frequented forums like RaGEZONE it's likely we've ran into each other before!

That’s how I was introduced to SQL!

I ended up cutting my teeth working on maintaining a MUD (that sadly just recently went offline). I think gaming is a big draw for tinkering and programming simply because how much time we spent interacting with it and how (at the time at least) it was very accessible to modify. A lot of what you're working on is changing data values and plugin-style things rather than getting bogged down in modeling and other much less approachable aspects of the game.

I imagine you can't throw a rock in the HN crowd without hitting someone who once worked on an EVE Online spreadsheet of one disposition or another.

Same here. Open Tibia servers were the first code bases I explored and tried to modify when I was a kid.

You've just reminded me of one of my learning experiences on my private server. I implemented a HTTP server. It was very basic but I didn't realize there were libraries I probably could have used.