Ramblings | Origins of Hamsterman2049

One of the ques­tions I get fair­ly often involves the ori­gin of the screen-name I use on a reg­u­lar basis.  Hamsterman2049 is cer­tain­ly a unique name, but it isn’t as ran­dom as it might appear.  There is a sto­ry that goes along with it, so sit back and I’ll tell you the tale of how this series of let­ters and num­bers came to be.

When I was grow­ing up, and even into my adult­hood, my mom was a grade-school teacher.  Like most class­rooms, hers usu­al­ly con­tained a class pet.  When the sum­mer hit, some­thing had to be done with this ani­mal, so it was either assigned to a kid from the class or brought home.  The most com­mon of these pets was of the small ani­mal vari­ety, usu­al­ly in the form of a ham­ster or gerbil.

After hav­ing tak­en care of quite a few of these class pets, my sib­lings and I decid­ed we want­ed some of our own to care for.  This is how I got my first set of ham­sters that we named Ham and Ster.  I went on to own sev­er­al oth­er ham­sters over the course of my child­hood and devel­oped a love of small animals.

Jump ahead to the night when I decid­ed I want­ed to try a new online game resem­bling one of my favorite series.  Graal Online, an online title much like The Leg­end of Zel­da, required of me a new user­name.  It being rather late into the evening (read as ear­ly morn­ing), I was hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time think­ing of any­thing clever.  Think­ing back to the time with my ham­sters, I decid­ed to pick the screen-name Ham­ster­man.  The choice went through fine for Graal, but I soon dis­cov­ered that there was an issue to over­come with this name.

The name start­ed to grow on me, but I very quick­ly dis­cov­ered that I was not the only per­son on the inter­net that liked ham­sters.  The screen-name was pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly tak­en on most web­sites, so I had to come up with some­thing mean­ing­ful to add to it.  At first, I put a num­ber of pre­fix­es to the name which spawned sev­er­al iter­a­tions of the name.  After try­ing out Micro­ham­ster­man, Ulti­ham­ster­man, Necro­ham­ster­man, Neo­ham­ster­man and more; noth­ing was stick­ing in quite the way I liked.  That’s when I had an epiphany that lead to my ulti­mate cre­ation of the name I use today.

One of my favorite rac­ing games for the Sega Dream­cast was San Fran­cis­co Rush 2049.  One day, while play­ing this game, I decid­ed that any­thing sounds sig­nif­i­cant­ly cool­er when you add the num­ber 2049 to the end of it.  Seri­ous­ly, check it out: yard work 2049, lob­ster ravi­o­li 2049, soli­taire 2049, boc­ce ball 2049.  After mak­ing this dis­cov­ery, I decid­ed to add this onto the end of Ham­ster­man and it’s always been avail­able.  To this day, I use this screen-name for near­ly every­thing and that’s how I came up with it.

Spe­cial thanks go to Wal­ter Cer­na for the amaz­ing draw­ing of Hamsterman2049 you see above.  Please check out the rest of his work on his web­site here.