My History in Gaming

The Beginning

When I was younger, around 4 years old, it was very uncommon for any gaming to happen in my house. Upon moving to Oklahoma, where I would spend the rest of my life up to this moment, I was gifted with a Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP, a small handheld system. It was a very big rule that I was only allowed to play while on planes or travelling. Slowly over time, that rule turned to only on the weekends, before for the most part being lifted altogether. I would play simple games like Lego Star Wars on it, and my taste slowly adapted, although I must say the Lego games always hold a fond place in my heart.

The Console

It’s difficult to recall when exactly this was given, but the first consoles I ever received was a Nintendo Wii along with a Game Cube. I played a lot more complicated games like Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Pikmin. Soon after, however, I think I found the game that left the biggest impact on me. I was given an old computer for both educational and recreational usage, and one of the games I was allowed to play was Lego Universe. Lego Universe was a Massively Multiplayer Online game where you could travel to different worlds with friends and destroy an evil force. Being able to choose between 4 factions, I typically went with Assembly, and became a turret-building Engineer. I believe this game heavily influenced my creativity and my ability to see how much games could do, and to this day I still partially wish it would come back after closing down 9 years ago. To this day I can remember the theme song.

Inspiration

With Lego Universe, and other games like Minecraft, Ark, and Terraria, I was heavily inspired to be creative and grow. I also would draw a fair bit and play a lot with Legos alone. Creativity has always been a large passion of mine; to be able to think of something, create it, and show it to people and see their reactions. Upon entering college, I tried to go into Engineering, thinking maybe I was destined for a more physical creativity. Soon after, however, I found that my passion wasn’t there. After a while of soul searching, I went back to college with the CSG major. My drive for creation, fulfillment of seeing a project finished and released to people all fit for my passion of gaming, drawing, and animating. I want to be able to make games that inspire people to same way they inspired me, and take people on journeys they may not otherwise be able to take.