If you’re a gamer on the internet, you’ve probably seen the picture: it’s a LAN party in the time of CRT monitors and beige towers. The players appear to be in a basement. One of the players is duct taped to the ceiling, his arms dangling so he can reach his PC.

The Duct-Taped Gamer was an early internet meme and a legend. For more than 15 years, people speculated about who he was, how he got up there, and if the duct taped cocoon affected his ability to no-scope noobs in Counter-Strike.

Years later, the Duct-Taped Gamer was identified as Drew Purvis, then a student at Mason High School in Mason, Michigan. Purvis and his friends frequently gathered in the basement of a friend’s house on weekends for extended Local Area Network (LAN) parties. If you weren’t gaming during that era, this means that people in a room physically wired their computers together to play competitive multiplayer games. The duct-tape incident occurred on the evening of March 29, 2003, where one night they decided to 'get goofy' and try and duct tape Purvis to the beam on the ceiling. After he was firmly in place, they built a desk tower so that he could game on his PC whilst in the duct tape cocoon - which he did for the next two hours. The photo landed on the internet soon after the LAN party, and the rest is history.