My history with Video Games

To change the technical line of posts, for today’s iDevBlogADay article I will write a bit about my history with Video Games and why I ended up developing them (or at least trying to), I also promise you to not extend the post too much.

Disclaimer: this is not the geek story of “I started programming when I was 4 years old, and wrote a BASIC interpreter at the age of 5″

My father is a mathematician, he would define himself as a theoretical computer scientist, however when he was just a bit more practical he used to do some coding. When I was about 4 years old, I used to play in the Macintosh 512K that he used for discrete simulation programming in BASIC. My first video game memories come from that time, and my favorite game by far was “Dark Castle”. What a remarkable game, I think every old-school “Mac Gamer” (if such thing exist) has at least heard about it. I remember that every afternoon I struggled to beat the levels (often failing), and in the opening screen, the first part of Bach’s Prelude in D-minor stands out and then some lightning sounds came out of the computer, now that was something!

On the paper side, me and my father tried to make a board game once, it was about the evolution of species, we never managed to finish it, but it was the first time that I eventually tried to make some sort of game. We worked on the graphics in the 512K (Mac Paint anyone?), the game rules where never totally clear for me but it was a worthy experience and it raised my curiosity quite a bit.

I don’t really consider myself a hard-core gamer, don’t get me wrong, I love some games, but I’m not the kind of guy that plays every single title that comes out for Xbox, PS3 and Wii. I actually don’t own a console (for now) for sanity reasons (I guess I would play too much!). In fact, the only console I ever owned was the original NES, I guess I played so much that my parents didn’t want to get me the SNES in fear of me lowering my school grades.

Still as a child I loved video games in 3 forms, the Arcade, the NES and the Performa LC575 that we got later. In fact, for a birthday I received top gun for the NES, and after watching this video about a year ago I laughed a lot because I returned that game within 3 days of trying to play it, and changed it for Adventure Island II which was great!.

I got a bit distracted from Video Games for a while though, I started taking piano lessons when I was about 8 years old, I think I focused most of my creativity into that for a long long time. I still play a bit, but sadly studying engineering takes a lot of time, and when I have some time I try to get away from civilization and go to the outdoors to clean up my mind.

Back to Games, there where some of them that really blew my mind and are worthy of enumeration:

• Dark Castle
• Commander Keen
• Doom I & II
• Exile (all the series)
• Prince of Persia II
• Wolfenstein 3D ( yeah, I actually played it after finishing Doom I & II )
• Mortal Kombat
• Dark Forces
• Warcraft I & II
• Quake I, II, III
• Diablo I, Diablo II

I think the one I played for the longest was Diablo II, with Pablo ( Gando Games Art Director ), I played Diablo II over Battle.net for ~7 years approximately! ( I’m totally screwed because all the speculation leads to think that Diablo III will be released this year, and then my productivity will drop for the next 10… )

I started experimenting with Video Games programming with a C++ book that I got somewhere, quite obscure and not really one of the classics. Still I remember my first experiments with C for the University. I wrote a blackjack that ran on the console, then a hang-man. After that I was totally hooked and eventually started doing some basic stuff with the SDL library. Wrote some basic particle simulations, and an incomplete asteroids clone, still I loved the Apple platform and it was kinda sad for me, because I wanted to write games but the community was quite small. A couple of years later, iPhone Development appeared as an option (2008?) and I knew that it was my chance to create games on a platform made by Apple.

To conclude the article, I think video games are just so important today. As books where for my father when he was very young, and movies impacted another generation, I think video games are an awesome way to make a positive impact in today’s society. In a many ways, video games have taught me so much in my life that I really hope to be able to do the same thing for other people here at Gando Games.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.
Agnes Repplier

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