For the love of the game

STORY BY MARKO WOLOSHYN
PHOTO PROVIDED BY SAM HERMACK

Sam Hermack dressed in her homemade Klingon outfit – Hermack and her fiancée hope to include a fan photo of themselves with Star Trek luminaries on their wedding invitations

Most married and engaged couples have touching stories about the proposal – at the restaurant where the couple first met, at a baseball game projected onto a Jumbotron, or maybe on a sun-kissed beach during an all-inclusive vacation.

Sam Hermack, 22, figured she would pop the question to her girlfriend, Michelle Skolly, 34, through their favourite shared pastime – video games.
Skolly, who runs skolly.net, a blog about programming and computer hardware, met Hermack when she was living with her best friend.

On Feb. 28 the couple’s second anniversary, Hermack presented Skolly with a gift in the form of a mod, or modification, she had built within the PC role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

In the video game world, mods are altered program codes that allow users to create their own characters, environments, weapons, quests as well as several other items and concepts.

Hermack’s mod was a quest specifically made for Skolly that began with a non-playable character (or NPC) imploring Skolly’s character to kill a bunch of monsters in a cave with her reward being the chest contained within.

What Skolly did not know, is the prize contained in the chest was a ring named “Engagement Ring” and her girlfriend would be proposing to her as she opened the chest.
Hermack, who sat and watched as her fiancée-to-be played the quest, said she was not scared about popping the question as much as she was nervous of the process.

“Well there was a lot of anxiety in building it because I wanted it to be perfect, but that could just be because I’m a perfectionist,” said Hermack in a phone interview. “But I knew she would probably like the quest. I also wanted to keep it playable, because the last thing I wanted was for her to get halfway through it and go ‘Oh darn it! Never mind, I don’t want to finish this quest!’”
Hermack, who moved from New Brunswick to Ontario at 18, said the couple’s personalities and interests operate nearly in tandem.

“She has short hair, I have long hair, that’s about it for differences,” said Hermack. “As we are talking, Michelle is playing a video game, so yeah, we’re pretty similar.”

Hermack said her passion for video games, science fiction and fantasy all started when she first read the Lord of the Rings trilogy at the age of 9.

Her interests have branched out into making costumes for the different comic conventions the couple began attending a few years ago.

“Well there was a lot of anxiety in building it because I wanted it to be perfect, but that could just be because I’m a perfectionist”
SAM HERMACK

“I suppose you could say I’m a little bit obsessive with these things,” said Hermack. “For my Klingon costume I had to make my own prosthetics for the forehead, I had to do some serious makeup stuff, and I used pop cans and leather to make armour.”

Although the date of the wedding is not set, Hermack and Skolly’s affinity for all things science fiction and fantasy will definitely play at least a minor role in the ceremony.

“We plan on using a picture of us with Captains Kirk and Picard (of Star Trek) as part of the wedding invitation,” said Hermack. “It will probably be a small wedding, with a few sci-fi accents, but not a full theme.”