This is my first entry in my video game's programming journal. I hope to accomplish here what I am suppose (that being the keyword here) to accomplish in my engineering journal(s). That is log everything that I learned from books and experimentation. This I do in hopes of becoming a real video game programmer. (Um, that did not quite happen.) The biggest, if not the only, reason why I took an interest in electronics at age 8 and computers at age 16.
I think that perhaps the biggest reason why I toke such a tremendous interest in video games was due to the virtual worlds that they create. Let's face it, reality is not bery pleasant all the time. This is especially true if you are growing up as an awkward, timid kid who often was ridiculed and left out for being "different." Something that most all of us could probably relate to at some point in our lives. Video games kind of provided a way of escape and it wasn't long before they became addictive. Yeah, video games can offer an escape from reality. So can reading books. These days, I play little video games and have little reason to retreat from the real world.
Being quite the imaginative person that I was (pats on the back please *smile*), I wanted to create my own virtual worlds into a game of mine own. I had lots of ideas and I thought that surely I could create something. But at the time all I had was an empty box that use to contain Pampers that my mom had thrown away. The box was, at least in my mind, suppose to be used to house the electrical components that that I was going to wire together from a shoe box full of used batteries, junk wire, and a bunch of scrap electrical components (light bulbs from flash lights, motors from broken toys, etc.) and dreams. Lot's of dreams but with no real knowledge of electrical electronics or anything of the sort, there wasn't any way for me at the time to convert the empty Pamper box that I obtained. So there it was. Ah yes, the old pamper box, I remember that vividly. This was during the Golden Age of Arcades (look it up on Wikipedia).
Over time, I did manage to learn enough about electricity to actually build something with it. I took an old Atari cartridge box, put a small motor and a pencil in it. The pencil was broken to be used as a shaft for scrolling a long strip of paper where I had hand drawn a stretch of road and scenery. In other words, I was trying to create a simple scrolling type of game. It worked, actually, but not very good. The scene, that is the paper, scrolled way too fast to even know what it was or what you were doing. Of course, without any advanced collision detection for my make shift car of a popsicle stick, it would not have been that fun to play anyhow. But for a 10 year old, hey, what could you expect. Digital Derby and Digital Daredevil were my inspirations for these types of games.
Eventually, I realized that the only way to make video games without having to learn extensive electronics was by the use of a computer. So, by the time I was 14, I began to take an interest in computers and by the time I was 15, I received one of mine own for Christmas. I did not really begin to learn it all that well until 6 months later when I turned 16, so there you have it. That computer, by the way, was my old Color Computer 2 and I am still active in the community.