PERSONAL INFORMATION

CHARACTER DESIGNS

Various character designs I have used on Legacy during my time.

FORUM SIGNATURES

Various signatures I have used on Legacy forums.

LIFE HISTORY

So for anyone who is interested (I can't think for the life of me who would be) here it is. I wasn't exactly from a well off family, my mother and father divorced when I was around 7 so when it came to technology I was a few years behind, until about the age of the 13 that is. Although the internet didn't really kick off until 1996 to 1997.

Amstrad 464

I think when I was around 9 or 10 it was that I got an Amstrad 464, like an old school computer with a green screen and games that played off a tape drive. Also around that time I managed to aquire a manual for it, with various BASIC computer programming information contained within. It was a friend of the family that first showed me how to do the only program on it he knew which was :

10 PRINT "Text here":
20 GOTO 10

Which basically when you type RUN prints whatever you want down the screen, over and over again until stopped. After seeing that I was pretty much hooked and set about learning everything in the 464 manual, before long I was writing a selection of graphical and text based games on it, even if they were only for my own amusement. I also used my new found programming abilities for various evil on the display computers in Toys R Us.

After that I got various consoles, a Master System, Megadrive (Genesis), Gameboy and eventually a PC. Although I say PC, it was literally a DOS computer that ran Windows 3.11. So nothing like any PC todays generation would be used to. I can't even remember how I learned the inner workings of this system, but after months of playing with it I discovered a program that came installed as standard called QBASIC which I quickly started to learn.

Windows 3.11

With my new found programming language I pretty much redid what I had done before, making various games to entertain myself along with other stuff if only to pass time as back then we didn't have the internet to amuse us and TV sucked (and I've never felt as old as I do after saying that). But yeah I made an RPG in it which was mostly text based and all sorts of random things. By this time I was like 13 and the internet was taking off, so the computers at my school upgraded to Windows 95 and got online. I learned how this new 'internet' worked by staying after school and doing this course about how to view webpages and send email (I kid you not). I think it stands out as one of the most comical qualifications I have in my life. After a while I discovered this thing called Google and that if I typed QBASIC in to it I got lots of websites about the subject.

Q-Basic

So now my time consisted of staying after school each night, searching through QBASIC stuff to download and putting it on a floppy disc to take home and play with. Shortly after that I got a new computer at home with dial-up internet access and needless to say when the entire internet becomes available to you, small pass times like QBASIC programming take a back seat.

For the first year or so I discovered various things on the internet and spent many sleepless school nights doing things online, I started with Yahoo messenger and chatrooms as most people do but was quickly bored of it and switched over to IRC channels. It was around the same time Napster was in full swing so I downloaded music on my horribly slow dial-up and played various single player games like Command and Conquer, etc.

It was about this time that most of my friends at school got hooked on playing Planetarion and a couple of friends and myself started playing Graal Online. Granted most of my initial time on both of these games was spent 'pwning noobs' although I'm pretty sure the word 'pwning' wasn't around then and we called then 'newbs' not 'noobs' (how language evolves). After a while I got in to the staff side of Graal Online, basically making stuff on the level editor and scripting things in their script engine.

I worked on Graal Online on various positions Police, NPC Admin, Graphics Admin, Playerworld Manager, etc. It gave me some great experience of running and working on games and more importantly got me back in to programming. About this time Planetation got banned from our school network and we all switched over to playing AlienAA instead. Around this time I also got annoyed at having staff over me in Graal Online overrule my decision and finally got the simple thought in my head 'I wouldn't have this problem if I had my own game.' and so it began!

The rest as they say is history and can be found in the Time Line to your right!

AFTER NOTE: On reading the above story I do realise it makes me sound like some anti-social computer nerd and I assure you during that time I did have run ins with the police, fights after school, cider drinking contests on street corners and various encounters with the opposite sex. But that is hardly relevant now is it.