The mid 2000s is seen by many as the Golden Age of the internet as well as when the 7th Generation of consoles replace the previous. Being a Nintendo nerd and with little allowance; the Wii was our only affordable and preferable option that we are glad we slaved away cutting yards to earn. It was so hot we were unable to find one for a full year finally buying one in August of 2007. Little did we know that in the October of the following year, we would become a part of a group of people we considered our gaming family at the time. We became a part of the Mario Kart Wii clan known as “Elite X” under the name Ex*Elementz.

A recruitment video was posted in the fall of 2008 which led us to a xat chat with other racers in the MKW scene. We wanna say that we were within the first 10 to join, joining around the same time as another member known as PhenoMario. We would go on to learn that he also lived in Texas which allowed us to meet him in 2016 and to visit each other homes and visit Japan together in 2018. Back on topic though…

It didn’t take long for everyone in the group to become friendly which returned in many fun after-school matches that ran well into the night. On the weekend, we’d stay up even later creating private rooms and doing fun random things like driving backways on courses. In time, we gained the nickname Elez and eventually Elexy which became our new handle(s) within the clan. Eventually, we all slowly but surely began using Skype.

Being a clan, we would have many days where we practiced, discuss strats, and worked on claiming Regional and Worldwide Records. Many of them were intense but whether we won or lost, we learned and had fun the way pre-teens and teens did during that time. Some of those clan battles; though they weren’t all recorded, still exist on youtube and are located in the playlist below. We were still an avid writer, so when we weren’t writing G.E.M.M.S or Elementz (v3) we were writing an Elite X Anime both in the chat and on one of the forums. Both though seem lost to time sadly.

It was also around this time we learned about hacking, particularly FTL hacking or For-the-Lose hacker from a member known as iHaxel and/or MrBean35000VR. The latter of which we stay on each other hacked Friend List for at least a few months. He would give out items and have either max VR/BR or 25000VR/BR and purposely got last place, thus giving a lot of it away only to refresh in before the next match. This made the game fun for everyone, even the randoms who had become increasingly aware via people/friends staying back and getting thunderclouds from the hacker. The reason was that the stacking of two thunderclouds cancelled out their negative effect resulting in a permanent speed boost. Eventually, PhenoMario would become a FTL fun hacker to alongside Alene and finally in 2009, we delved in, backupped up and set-up all the safeguards for our Wii’s NAND. We had to swap from Wii Wheel to Nun Chuck+ Wiimote and set up our hack and joined in the fun. Some of those videos are also in the playlist. Also gotta a couple ROCK and MLK; a few of our friends from LMCA to join in the fun.

During this time we rose through the rank and was one of about 7 or member who gained Owner status alongside Pheno, FlyKart, Alene and we believe JCop and or Anthony.

Despite this, we would continue to hone our actual skills as both a team and individuals up until around 2011-ish maybe. Along with experimenting with new names like Infinity X & Eternity X, people were also growing up and moving on with their lives and many things began to change, primarily the fact that the chat was dying and as a team, we weren’t racing as much due to life. In the following years, the chat would even dwindle down to just us as we held on to the phrase “Forever alone on the EX chat.”. This would remain true until the site hosting the site had its code updated and thus no longer displays on the team website. Today, we have the tab open all the time but we barely check it as it’s unfortunately “dead”.

We enjoyed the good times and eventually met two of our clan members in real life. The first being Pheno whom we mentioned early and the second was our clan leader, the one responsible for bringing us all together Andy. The other members we saw ourselves close to were Zander, Alene, FlyKart, Roxy, Owstin, wafflez, JCop, Myron, GuapS & Michi. Sorry, we remember others but these were a few of the people we could or did really vibe with.

This article is still incomplete and subject to edits and updates.

Many memorable events were born within the chat and between members, some of those included:

-Late-night fun rooms

-Homerwork Day

-Pie & Sprite Masta Pheno aka Phone (t)

-Edgy Elez: Eccentric Master of the Anime Underground

-The anime romance of Kiry & Elexy

-God Bless all Spear User on Rainbow Road

-Pheno, Elez & FlyKart: RowdyRuff Boyz Unite!

-The Mysterious Mr. Karto

-Doodling and Youtubing as a team on xat

Constantly updating BG that were either Mario Kart related or were an anime pic that represented members of the team.