Introduction

Today is my 40th birthday. On March 14, 1967 my mom gave birth to me in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. I don’t consider this event to be world shattering by any means but as I am now officially “middle aged” it’s considered normal to look back at what many feel is the first half of your life and look forward to the second half. Let me state up front that I don’t feel 40 years old at all. I still consider myself to be a big kid in many ways. I am perhaps a little more responsible now and I try to think more about the consequences of my actions before I make decisions in my life but overall being 40 isn’t that big of a deal to me. Getting to be 50 years old might be…but that’s a discussion for a decade from now.

Being not only a gamer at 40 years old but also one that happens to get paid for writing about the industry is certainly something that warrants a small essay (and for those of you who think this is self-indulgent…..no comments from the peanut gallery). It’s a little weird to be born in a time when just a few years later the first real game consoles and home computers started showing up in people’s homes and therefore starting up the massive industry that covers everything from small one man game dev teams all the way up to multi-million dollar projects that sometimes employ hundreds of people. There are people in the world younger than me but still adults who have never lived in a world without video or PC games and there are people older than me who might still consider this industry to be a recent “fad” that doesn’t seem to go away.

So where does that leave people like me? I’m not quite sure to be honest. I remember being very young when the first Pong games came out and watched in amazement as I saw friends play the game on their TV screens (my parents never bought us a video game system). Later I would play games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and more either at a friend’s house or via a local arcade. The cultural impact of those games were definitely felt by me but I can’t say that I was a massive gamer in my youth primarily because we didn’t have a console or PC at our home at the time. Yet I knew that somehow this form of entertainment was going to grow and evolve into something much more than a fad.

I actively re-entered playing games in the 1990s as I tried to get my communications degree from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC. The PCs in the computer rooms had Doom and Descent installed and I knew that gaming had somehow caught up with my visions of what it could be back in the 1980s. These were not flat 2D cartoon worlds that made me catch mushrooms or chase a blue ghost but 3D worlds to explore and experience (and of course shoot at things). The one-two combo punch of Doom and Descent not only made me an obsessive gamer but also made me want to learn more about the industry and eventually to write and report on its comings and goings. I learned about people with names like John Carmack and John Romero and Will Wright. I learned about upcoming games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, both of which were right up my alley when I began playing them. I heard about some upstart called Epic that had a long-in-development game called Unreal. I read about the coming revolution in 3D graphics with something called “3D accelerators” and a company called Voodoo3D that was leading the charge to make graphics even better for games.

Yep I was hooked; not just about playing the games but wanting to learn more about them and maybe take my newly earned communications degree and report, somehow, on the industry. After working for daily newspapers for five years I made the move to become a full time game journalist in 2000 and that’s where I have stayed to this day.