EPTSo today (17th) is my birthday. I have made it, once again, around the sun without either falling off or being jettisoned into space. Despite TL.net trying to tell me it's not in Korea. Screw you, Korea, you're not the boss of me!
So, as a celebration of reaching the only Mersenne Prime that I will be aware that I am alive for (unless somehow I hit 127), I thought I would chronicle my existence with relation to video games.
I was a reasonably early adopter of gaming. My dad used to fix televisions (back when that was actually possible) and my mum is a teacher. If you're a british child and one or more of your parents teaches, the computational device you would usually is a BBC.
![[image loading]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46504000/jpg/_46504129_bbc_micro.jpg)
Something like this. Check out those red function keys. Note: That is not me in that picture
So when I wasn't sitting in front of the washing machine, being captivated by the clothes going around and around and around and..... uh, sorry. When I wasn't doing that I was trying to play some games!
I had the "B" variant. This one came without a number pad. I had a printer, though.
The BBC takes the 5 1/4" diskettes. One of them could hold many games, and often did!
I think the idea with this was that I would play games that would help me learn. I also think it was no mistake that it was next to the piano, so that I would practice before learning or whatever.
So, we had "games" like this:
![[image loading]](http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/01/gg_achoo2.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/01/gg_thewitch.jpg)
Granny's Garden. I don't even
I was 5 years old.
Instead, I spent a lot of time playing Daredevil Dennis and Jet Power Jack
![[image loading]](http://www.bbcmicrogames.com/screenshots/denis.jpg)
I never made it past level 6
I also played a lot with Dart. I learned a lot about arithmetic from that. Creating awesome pictures by rotating squares by 4 degrees 90 times (learning to divide gogogo).
My parents, I think, weren't that pleased with my desire to jump over houses on a motorbike. However, along with one of my friends' parents, we got new diskettes with more games on as time progressed.
The learning didn't really happen. There's only so much you can learn from playing Fast Snapper (x2 speed yo!).
I do remember some other games where you had to collect numbers in ascending order or something, had to shoot the number 9 but not the number 6.
However, my other favourite games were Mr E, Pengo (ported to BBC) and Overdrive.
Oh man I forgot about Repton 3. That was a game. Sound Synth out of the crappy BBC speaker. So good. Also, I glitched the crap out of that game to beat it.
I didn't really have a console. I remmeber the family over the street had a NES (Nintendo) and a SNES (Super Nintendo - some people don't use these acronyms normally) and my sister and I go over and play when the families got together. I remember they had a super scope or whatever the gun for the SNES was.
We got the NES when they didn't want it any more and I played the crap out of Super Mario. I also ended up weird games like Ultimate Stuntman and BMX Simulator.
I didn't really play any games seriously back then. I just played to try to complete them. The first I completed was, unsurprisingly, Mario. I went back and tried to complete it faster and faster and without dying.
I never did complete it without at least one death. Always died on 8-1 (lol jumps) or 8-3 (hammer bros!).
I thought about keeping trying, but I figured nobody would care if I could complete it in under 10 minutes or not. Thankfully nobody has set up some kind of group where people try to complete runs of games with as much speed as they could, so I didn't miss out on anything.
So at some point my dad was made redundant from his work. He started something new in computer something or other (well it was "new" in the early 90s anyway) and he got a PC!
It was a 386 DX-33 I think. We got a shareware version of Descent to play on it. I played it for 15 minutes and was almost sick. I couldn't figure out which way up was any more, flew into walls and eventually got killed.
I didn't play that game again.
![[image loading]](http://mimg.ugo.com/201004/42453/cuts/descent_288x288.jpg)
Games were for masochists back then. This is probably upside down. I don't even know.
Also got Shareware Doom. Played that forever, even made some custom maps for it.
Played Monkey Island. So much Monkey Island. Those games really got me into adventure/point and click games. They are masterpieces.
Played a lot of C&C and got played in a bunch of LANs with some other kids from school. Those were the days. I say "LAN", it was 2 PCs and a null-modem cable, but damnit: MULTIPLAYER C&C. Best. Ever.
I kind of skipped Quake. One of the other kids was pretty good, though. The LANs upped the tech a notch when we all got PCI Network cards and got the 10 base 2 networks going. Trailing Coax around the house to play Duke 3D, Blood, Red Alert and Colin McRae Rally. Good times.
I adopted the id: GowerlyGod. Because Gower is my last name and I was 14 and it was 10 characters long, which was the most you could have in Duke 3D and I didn't like leaving empty space.
We didn't get a home internet connection. My online exploits were around a friend's house. We played Subspace a lot. Now called Continuum, I think. Might even be still going. "Top down" space game. Definitely worth checking out.
We also embraced the console gaming ideals and played a lot of Micro Machines 2 gathered around a PC and screaming at each other. There's nothing like bumping someone out of a tree house, or into the right corner pocket of a pool table when racing around.
Then, around 1997, came a strategy game that I got into for so long I played it pretty much nothing else for a long time. I got pretty good at the game and even started playing online when our internet connection came out. I felt that this game, the strategies involved were many and varied, the maps were well thought out and designed, the units, the teching structure, the economy set up, everything was amazing.
Yes, Total Annihilation was to keep me indoors thinking up gameplay for years. I completely ignored Starcraft. I played the single player at some point, I think, but I when I tried to play online I would build things and my opponents would build zerglings and I would die and get upset and stop playing.
TA, however, was incredible. With the inifinite economy, games could go on forever. So many units to make, so many could be around at once, battles were epic and varied. That was, until I learned how to play properly and that all you had to do was build stealth fighter bombers and win every game.
![[image loading]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_u_yOEKC-HAQ/TPbSjSF3fkI/AAAAAAAAAAk/E8s3F9H-oF8/s1600/totala06.jpg)
Just look at that. Best game ever. TA:Kingdoms was crap, though. Sorry, CT :<
In 2000 I went to university and was spoiled so hard. 100 Mbit full duplex internet. Thank you, JANet.
I found Unreal Tournament and a mod: Unreal Fortress. I'd played a bit of Q1 TF and really got into that. I think that was the game that introduced me to online communities. I participated actively on the forum and got well-known for my sniping (which wasn't hard as I was playing with people on dialup, so my ping was 5 and theirs was 150).
I joined a clan and it was great fun. I even went over to the states to play at a bigger social lan event.
During that time I played a fair bit of Super Smash Brothers (the N64 one). I loved it. Jigglypuff best character. At that point I switched my gamename from Gowerly/GowerlyGod to Gowerlypuff. Seriously. I did that. Some of my older logins are still that.
With the standard Unreal Tournament I played on servers for a UK games magazine called PC Zone. Eventually I became an admin for their UT and UT2003 servers, as well as a moderator for their hardware support forum. <3 those guys.
I tried out a bunch of stuff. I played a lot of Warcraft 3 mods, some Age of Empires, a little bit of Quake 3. I completed Deus Ex. Twice. It was that good.
I also still played a lot of TA, on whatever platform was running it at the time. Possibly Gamespy Arcade (oh man those were the days). I was pretty good at that game. I played a game where I left half way through for 30 minutes, churning out units and came back expecting to have lost, but he was still under attack from my constant onslaught.
I switched to some UT2003 around that time, just about passed my Bachelors and then realised that a Maths and Computer Science degree wasn't getting me anywhere.
I took a job doing tech support (which my dad had taken up with his training, so I knew my stuff) and realised that I wanted to do stuff in the video games industry. My problem was I was terrible at any game that was popular, and continually made terrible decisions about what would be a successful game. (Hah Starcraft won't be popular, it'll all be about TA - NOPE)
So, instead of playing them for a living, I went for the other thing that might be fun: Making them for a living.
I went up to the University of Abertay, in Dundee, for their Masters in Computer Games Technology.
The course was really well thought out. Modules in AI, Direct X, PS2 programming, Games Design and a group project. I really enjoyed it, and met some great people.
Abertay is also host to Dare To Be Digital, which is an amazing competition. Pitch a game idea, if it's liked, you get 10 weeks to make a protype of it. So we did.
This is us! Melting the faces off of fish? ALL ME. I am the best at coding.
Alas, after the competition was over, we found it hard to have anyone too interested in our project. Steam was still a bit crummy back then, there was no indie stuff on it and people weren't interested in those smaller types of games.
We did have discussions with Eidos, but they wanted us to have a company set up and a loan secured before providing us with a letter of intent and the banks wanted us to have a letter of intent before providing us with any form of business loan. DISASTER.
So, in the end, we went our separate ways and got jobs. I got a job at.... EA.
I was placed on a team working on reviving an old EA IP (alas the project was canned). The lead programmer on that project, though, was none other than the guy that wrote Daredevil Dennis. It was like my life had come full circle, like it was telling me that this was what I was destined to do. Or, it could have been a coincidence. He's a really nice guy, too, really into his science. Lunchtimes were spent talking about whatever podcast he'd listened to on his ridiculous commute to work.
While there I started playing TA's successor: Supreme Commander.
![[image loading]](http://www.atomicgamer.com/screenshots/game-2770/38664-800.jpg)
Just imagine it's like PvP. Lasers
This game came at the best possible time for me. I'd played in the beta and had just had an engagement to someone I'd been with for 3 years break down. I was devastated, so getting into this game and being sociable with these people helped me.
Again, I got pretty good at this game, but stopped playing it so much after a while. Later, though, the standalone expansion Forged Alliance came out and I got onto the beta for that, so started playing again.
At the start of 2008 I left EA and went to work for Codemasters. Later I would remember my NES games days and realise that most of the games I'd played there were made by these guys. Well, maybe some of them. It was a long time ago. Again, a sign, quite obviously.
What I thought would be my big break was the iSeries sping event at i32.
There was going to be WCG Qualifiers for "RTS". The RTS events were going to be Supcom FA and World In Conflict.
We had a team of 4 players (we called ourselves the Q Squids) and we were going to rock the FA tournament. Our mean oppostion: Team Dignitas. They had 0 supcom players, but a really good World in Conflict team, so we realised it was going to be down to the deciding game, which was going to be either Warcraft 3 or C&C3.
We didn't think this would be much of an issue, surely we could bust out something? Sadly, though, the sponsors decided to drop those games, so there was no breaking out onto the world scene with supcom, so sad.
I can see why, though, for the finals of the 2v2s, ReDeYe came out and announced the finals to about 3 of us, and 2 of us were there trying to help out the other 2 of our 4v4 team win the finals.
FA was also getting less support from the publishers, so I went in and helped out with the community effort to fix a lot of the bugs. We did quite well working with the lua and, with an inordinate amount of work by Ze_Pilot, created Forged Alliance Forever
After that I still kept playing, joining into some casted games!
While playing I also started casting some Supcom Games with an up and coming caster called Deman with people over at QuadV. I casted some games with players such as Sir_Loui, TheBigOne, TheLittleOne and Matiz. I had played games with a couple of them on ladder in the past (I was 2nd in the 2v2 FA ladder at the time).
It was a lot of fun. We played 8 player Free For Alls on some massive (and some tiny) maps.
TheBigOne helped me out in some of my games. I got better and I went to hang out in Multiplay's other, more social event, the StratLan.
This is a 200 person lan where you just turn up and play some games. We played hours of Flatout 2 and I was introduced to Heroes of Newerth. I really got into it and played that quite a lot for about 12-18 months. Deman, however, chose to play this other game called League of Legends. I said it looked like someone of about 5 years old had drawn it with Crayons and that nobody would play it and so to enjoy your crayon game ggwp.
Obviously the best decision of my life right there.
I got into the beta for Starcraft 2, but didn't play that either. Eventually I realised I was terrible at HoN, so switched over to playing more SC2. Talking to TBO still I started watching TLO's channel and got to be a mod. I'd also started work on some random tools, which I'd hoped would add some value to the casting.
One, which really helped me in my own, now solo, supcom casts was one that threw up a transparent window on which I could draw. I also worked on StarGraphed, which was a fun exercise in dealing with the SC2 Map Editor's Trigger System.
All of which leads me up to now. I play SC2 as a random race. I've made it to diamond league EU, I mod TLO's, Ret's and Day[9]'s Chat. I've competed at Dreamhack and Lost Amazingly. I've met some awesome people and learned a great deal.
Do I have advice for people who want get further in gaming communities? Yes I do. Go for it. If you like a community, do your best to help out. Create things, do things, help out with things. The worst thing that could happen is that they go horribly wrong, but so what? Try again!
10 years ago I was really shy. I was worried that I would fail and so didn't try to do things, instead living in my mind where I had done them and they'd gone awesomely. Eventually, though, it's better to just do them. SOMETIMES YOU DON'T FAIL.
TL;DR: 31 years on this planet, most of them playing video games. Even so, have met a whole bunch of people, done a great deal of things and found a lot of happiness from playing and making video games, helping to create the experience that we all enjoy.
Video games, and you guys, are pretty awesome. Go you guys <3. Shoutouts to absolutely everyone with whom I have ever interacted.
I gave up after about 20 minutes of bumping into walls in the most confused way ever. 
