My memory is somewhat foggy on this, but I’m fairly sure this name’s introduction into the gaming zeitgeist was originally crafted by my close friend, once known as MICH and now more commonly nowadays by the online moniker, Rollh.
A significant figure in both my formative years and in my adult life, he was one of the best overall gamers I have ever met, holding a natural aptitude for an undeniably impressive variety of game genres, typically being indefinably better than myself and all of our mutual friends at pretty much all of them. An original member of the Pro Impact Players crew in competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee during the Golden Age of Smash, he pioneered an early technique with the the Ice Climbers that took over a decade to see properly exploited in the competitive community, and remains largely uncredited for those contributions, having come so early in the vast swath of content that has since flooded the internet.
In addition to being a great player, he possesses an intellect that, like most intellectuals, doesn’t necessarily translate to an especially prosperous or successful lifestyle. So, naturally, at some point, he came up with “Khelben Mortis.”
I think.
Like I say, I’m not 100% sure and my memory is foggy on the subject, and while in the infantile competitive gaming scene I had never really gone by any other name than my initials (RJM) in Smash, surely at some point I was granted this unusual and eclectic and heterogeneous alias. I suppose I never properly embraced it for a long time and perhaps its fundamental disconnect from a typical sobriquet combined with my reticence to disconnect myself from my own identity was the primary hindrance. But as I’ve said elsewhere, there’s room in today’s world where people have grown to live two lives—one in the real world and one behind a screen—and while I still believe myself to be fundamentally the same person in both lives, the distinction between my online existence embracing the “Khelben Mortis” alias has inexplicably grown wider. Arguably, there are more people in my immediate circle of friends and contacts that refer to me as Khelben than by my actual name.
But getting back to the actual question: where did this name come from? Bro, I don’t fuckin’ know. I don’t remember the first time it was uttered or how it ever came to be what it is today. As far as I know, it may well have been a random concoction of syllables that he first uttered during a gaming session at Jon’s place while we played PaRappa the Rapper for the firs time, I dunno. Some people have occasionally done their share of Googling and associated it with Khelben “Blackstaff” Arusun from Dungeons and Dragons, who allegedly first appeared in a 1988 comic book, but I don’t really think that has anything to do with it. D&D was never a part of our post-adolescent lore and I don’t know the first thing about this Blackstaff guy.
So basically, the answer is, “I don’t really know.,”
Not very satisfying, I know…