🕹 Games That Define my Youth

Growing up I played a lot of video games. I was birthed into the gaming generation with a controller in my hand by the time I was four years old gawking at the wonders that could be found in Pokemon Snap on the Nintendo 64, roaming around on moons in Battlezone, to building a blanket fort and skipping a day of school to play Kingdom Hearts on the Playstation 2 as a seven year old.

Gaming defined my childhood, and it was something that enabled me to pursue a path into working in the games industry. Fascinated, by the introduction of art, coding, and design to create something always made me want to learn more about the inner workings on games, game design, and the collective industry as a whole.

Now, I’m in my early thirties ; I ‘ve played hundreds of games, have sunk hundreds of hours into gaming, and have allowed this hobby and passion of mine to consume me. Gaming has shaped my personality, and enabled me to pursue a vocation into an industry that has given me so much joy and happiness. I hope that gaming brings others joy, as it has for me.

With that being said, here are the games the shaped my youth and enabled me to become a game developer. I’ll break the games that I grew up playing.

Tycoon Games as a child.

I grew up in the era of Internet dial-up sharing an old Apple computer with my dad and my sister until I was given a Sony Vaio when I was around eight when we moved from Los Angeles, to Bozeman, Montana.

Here I spent the majority of time playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 1-3, Sim City, and Zoo Tycoon. I hadn’t gotten into the Sims until I was in my late teens. My fondest memory was the introductio of Battlezone, and Myst when I was a child. But what capitivated me the most, was tycoon and simulation games. I remember first playing Sim City 1998 in computer lab in Elementary school in Bozeman, Montana.

This class was an introduction to “computer-skills”. How to use a keyboard, and so on and so forth. On the computer we were allowed to play Sim City, Dino-racer, and a math game I can’t quite remember the name of.

First Person Shooters

Aside from Tycoon games, I was heavily invested in two First Person Shooter games, that paved the way that introduced me to coding and level design. The first was Delta Force: Black Hawk Down by Novalogic, and the second game was Counter Strike : Condition Zero. DF:BHD introduced me to level design at nine years old. I remember spending hours tinkering with the map editor, and then hosting these maps for other people to play on DFBarracks.com.

DF:BHD introduced me to the world of web design and creating a gaming “clan” called the Eagles where I recruited other passionate games to wear the tag as we ran around playing our custom maps, or running around the map Panic Attack.

From 14-18 these were the two games I frequently played before Counter Strike Source and Team Fortress 2 consumed my summers. I attended boarding school in my teens where the focus was on snowboarding and sports. So after snowboarding, I would log on and spend my nights in CS:CZ, CSS, and TF2.

CS:CZ introduced me to Python through its AMX modding program. Here I had my own server with a custom MOTD (Message of the day) that directed people to my “gaming website and forum”. My Counter Strike serve had a heavy rotation of Fy_Poolday, Iceworld, and Scoutz Knives. At 12 CS-CZ introduced me to the world of coding as I had to learn PHPBB and setting up my own custom web-server via an FTP.

Mind you, these were the early 2000’s where I was consumed in learning Python, writing mods for my server in my teens, whilst trying to maintain a small forum where we could talk about games when we weren’t playing games.

Consoles and More

Lastly, I grew up transitioning away from playing games behind my laptop, and PC.Diving head first into console games when I moved to Los Angeles at seventeen to go to The Los Angeles Film School. My remaining years as a teen was shaped by RPG titles, and science fiction such as Mass Effect, Skyrim, Star Craft 2, and more that definitely are core gaming memories looking back.

I fell in love with the breadth and depth that was the Mass Effect world being able to transport myself to distant galaxies as commander Shepherd with his crew and more. The Xbox 360 and PS3 era allowed me to escape into a world of story-telling that really blew me away.

From Beyond Two Souls, Uncharted, Star Craft, and more. The console era in the early 2010’s - 2014 was an era in gaming that will stick with me.

Standout titles

I was shaped into the Xbox 360 era in my late teens. From using stasis to slow down enemies in Dead Space, to exploring distant planets in Mass Effect, the highlight of my late teens to early twenties was primarily RPG focused console hits.