Ever since I saw a commercial for an Apple computer on TV (back in the 6th grade), I wanted to play with computers.
In the 7th grade, I took a BASIC programming class. We had 4 Commodore PET computers. I wanted one real bad.
My dad arranged so that I could borrow a Timex Sinclair computer for a few weeks one summer. I wrote my first "real" game on that computer. I won't bore you with the gory details--It was fun for about 2 minutes (ok, 1 minute) but I was proud of it.
Later, my dad bought an Atari 800 (with tape drive!) I was so excited to start programming it! I wanted to make a great database program.
Yeah right.
You know all I wanted to do was program games.
Ok, I played my share of games on that machine too.
It was a while before I got a disk drive. Me and that tape drive had a lot of battles together. Man that thing pissed me off! I lost so many programs on that thing. It got to the point where I would save my work-in-progress (for my latest, and greatest, game) to at least four different tapes. And I would still lose stuff!
One day, I got so mad that I pounded the tape drive with my fist (this wasn't necessarily an unusual occurrence, except that I hit it extra hard this time--my fist hurt too). Well, the reverse mechanism stopped working. I really showed that tape drive who was boss.
This was absolutely wonderful because now, every time I needed to rewind a tape, I had to take the tape out of the tape drive, run upstairs, and use the reverse on our stereo's tape deck. Oh joy.
Eventually, I got a disk drive and things got MUCH better. Before I actually had my own disk drive, I had, err, uh, ...bought..., a bunch of really cool games on disks from a friend at school. I must have had over 100 awesome games that I couldn't play because I didn't have a disk drive. It drove me crazy (my friend had moved down to California by this time). You can probably guess that I was up for about 200 hours straight, playing games just after I got my Atari 1050 disk drive.
Well, then I got a PC...a 286! Then I started programming games in BASIC for the PC. Then I met a guy who got me into programming real games in Assembly...for money! I did a few contract programming games with him. He's a big wig at Microsoft now.
Then, I started designing and writing my own games.
Then, I started writing my own graphic engines.
Then, I started writing Windows programs.
Then, I started writing Windows games using a Windows animation engine I wrote.
Then, I started writing retail software at Edmark.
Then, I co-started Monolith.
Then, I started writing demos with DirectX
Then, I wrote an all new gaming engine using DirectX.
Then, I started writing games for Windows 95 using DirectX.
Then, I wrote this web page which has probably rambled on long enough.