So, I gotta tell you about this thing, this “Nicky Ferrair” name that got stuck in my head a while back.
It started pretty randomly. I was chatting online with an old buddy, you know, reminiscing about the early internet days, the stuff we used to download from who-knows-where. And he just casually dropped this name, “Nicky Ferrair”. Didn’t say much else, just that it was something from way back then.
My First Steps Down the Rabbit Hole
Naturally, I got curious. Nicky Ferrair. Sounds kinda cool, right? Maybe a bit flashy. My first thought was it was maybe an alias for some programmer, or maybe a character in some obscure shareware game I’d forgotten about. So, I did what anyone does: I hit up the search engines.
Well, that was pretty much a bust. Got a bunch of hits for people with similar names on social media, but none of them felt right. Definitely not the vibe of something from the dial-up era my friend was talking about.
Digging Deeper into the Past
I pinged my friend again, asked for more details. He was fuzzy on it, just remembered the name associated with “something cool” from the 90s. Not super helpful, but it gave me a timeframe. 90s… okay, maybe BBS scene? Demo scene? Old shareware sites?
So, I started digging through some old archives I still have copies of. Fired up a virtual machine to browse ancient file listings from BBSes I used to frequent. Spent a good chunk of time just searching through text files, `*`, `file_*`… looking for any mention.
- Searched old software lists.
- Checked out forums dedicated to retro computing and gaming.
- Asked around in a couple of those forums if the name rang a bell.
Mostly got shrugs. A few “hmm, sounds kinda familiar” but nothing concrete. It was getting frustrating. You know how it is when a name just tickles your memory but you can’t place it?
A Glimmer, Then Nothing
At one point, I thought I struck gold. Found a link on a really old, archived webpage – looked like maybe GeoCities or Angelfire? It mentioned something about “NFerrair”. Close! But the link to whatever file it pointed to was dead, obviously. Just led to a 404. Another dead end. I almost packed it in, figured my buddy just mashed up a memory or something.
The Breakthrough (Sort Of)
Then, totally by accident, I was watching some random YouTube video about old Amiga demos. Just background noise while I was doing something else. And someone in the comments mentioned a music track called “Nikky Ferrair” (note the spelling!) in a specific demo from like ’93 or ’94.
Hold on. Nikky with a ‘K’? Ferrair? That had to be it, right? Misremembered spelling!
So I searched again, using this new spelling and the demo name mentioned in the comment. And bam! Found it. Well, I found the demo, downloaded it, and extracted the music files. It used the old `.mod` format.
The Big Reveal… Kinda
I finally found it. Played the track. It was… okay. A pretty standard looping Amiga mod track from that era. Nothing earth-shattering. “Nicky Ferrair” wasn’t a person, wasn’t a game, it was just the title of this random music track inside an old demo.
So yeah, after all that digging, the big mystery turned out to be pretty small. It wasn’t some legendary lost game or programmer alias. Just a song title.
But honestly? The process of searching, digging through those old digital archives, that was the fun part. It’s wild how much stuff from that era is just gone, or buried deep. Makes you appreciate the history, you know? Even if the treasure at the end is just a simple tune.
