I have no idea what my first computer was. All I remember is it wasn't like the computers at school which were monochrome green. Mine was monochrome orange. It had a 5.25" Disc drive, but not enough video capabilities to even run Crystal Caves (or was it Caverns?). It had only two games: Bounty Hunter (name the American states and their capitals) and Monopoly (Not bad for ASCII... or ANSI, or whatever).
I wanted to make a game too. All I had to work with was EDIT.EXE, my first "programming" language. Simple batch.bat files to run simple code. My first program? "echo Hello World". Well, it was probably something along the lines of "echo Testing" or "echo BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME", but the sentiment was there. Later I learned "@echo off" and how to use %n statements and choice strings...
Of course about this time the popular game was Hugo House of Horrors and the stuff I was making couldn't possibly compete with that at the time. It was just a hobby after all.
Later we got our second computer. A Leading Edge Fortiva 5000 for $1500 (Windows 3.1 man, CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY~!!!!). I played some of my favourite games at the time; Castle of the Winds and Excelsior Phase One. I made our first computer upgrade to make the thing able to run Descent... the discovery of UniVBE. I also discovered QBasic.
I spent many years making simple games in QBasic. Most of which are lost now (They're backed up on 5.25", assuming they're intact all I'd need to do is buy a reader). Rock, Paper, Scissors with simple animations, a Bomberman clone... even a simple RPG (largely inspired by the QBasic game Last Fantasy 3, GO DOOMER!). By the time I made my first AI, the N64 was released and I pretty much gave up. I was too far behind the times.
So I played other peoples games for a while. My computer was really getting old. 700MB just wasn't cutting it anymore and even the Pentium 90 was getting old. Diablo was always beyond my reach. Still, I enjoyed Descent 2, Journeyman Project Turbo and the entire Apogee Shareware lineup. When the computer finally died of some unknown partition error I gave up on PC gaming completely and went back to consoles.
Some time shortly after the millennium I played Phantasy Star Online... then I awoke in 2007* I found the gaming world was in ashes. Games lacked the innovation I loved from the old days. I tried getting back into QBasic, but it just wasn't good enough. I dabbled in Visual and C, but I just didn't like it. I finally settled on GameMaker (4 at the time if I remember correctly). I've been "learning" it ever since. And by learning I mean procrastinating.
I never really took it as seriously as I used to. I mostly just played all the free games I could find... a demo here or there. Then I discovered Cave Story. What is this? An indy game that's good? Certainly it couldn't compete against multi-million dollar corporations. Well, I liked it. So I looked up more Indy games and more indy games. Then I noticed something... I've always been indy. While people were playing Doom I was playing Castle of the Winds. While people were playing Duke Nukem 3D I was playing Jumpjet and Slan and Evasive Maneuvers. While people were playing Worms I was still playing Scorched Earth and Clonk (Radikal at the time). At that moment I decided I absolutely must create a notable indy classic.
Of course, it's been 2 years now and I'm still basically where I started. I thought a little history lesson might be insightful. I must get a project done, even one of them.
Goodnight World, Lok.
*Yes, I pretty much spent 7 years non-stop on PSO... multiboxed and everything. The sad part is I've never played it online except for about a week during the open beta of Blue Burst.
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