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I’ve been gaming for what seems like forever and to be honest, compared to most of you I have been. This is a brief history of my love affair with gaming.

The Early Days

In 1977, Atari released the Atari VCS (later known as the Atari 2600).

When it was released, the Atari VCS was only designed to play 10 simple challenge games. However, the console included an external ROM slot where game cartridges could be plugged in; the potential was quickly discovered by programmers around the world, who created games far outperforming the console’s original designed.

The original list of games:

1. Air-Sea Battle
2. Basic Math
3. Blackjack
4. Combat
5. Indy 500
6. Star Ship
7. Street Racer
8. Surround
9. Video Olympics
10. Pong

The integration of the microprocessor also led to the release of Space Invaders for the Atari VCS in 1980, signifying a new era of gaming.

Atari 2600

I got an Atari 2600 sometime right around christmas of 1980 and grew to love the like Asteroids, Pitfall, Frogger, Pong, Space Invaders and of course Adventure.

PC Gaming - The Start

In 1980 I was in sixth grade and attending Lakewood Elementary School in Euless Texas. I got accepted into their “Talented and Gifted Program” and started taking programming classes on the TRS 80 using Level III BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) developed by Microsoft. All our development at that time was done using audio cassette drives.

Because I had been playing quite a bit of Adventure and the fact that the TRS 80 had at best rudimentary graphics I started learning how to program “Adventure” style games on those TRS 80’s.

That really was my first adventure into both programming and PC Gaming.

PC Gaming - The Next Phase

I continued to play around with programming computers all through High School and then ended up in the Military for a few years. While in the military I continued to play games mostly on a Commodore 64 System although I also played around on the IBM XT (8088 based), the IBM Personal Computer/AT (80286 based) and the XT 286 (also 80286 based).

When I left Active Duty Military in 1991 I ended up purchasing a Intel 386 based system which was a 32-bit microprocessor first introduced in 1985 but not really affordable until a few years afterwards.

It was at this time that he first real commercial games became available via BBS and were considered shareware. The majority of these games came from iD Software and included the following titles:

• Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons (released on December 14, 1990)
• Wolfenstein 3D (released on May 5, 1992)
• Doom (released on December 10, 1993)

In 1993/1994 I got my first Intel 486 based system and moved to Silicon Valley to begin working professionally as a Software Engineer and continued to play video games.

PC Gaming - MMO Phase

I continued to play most of these games when I first moved to California and in 1997 I found Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

What exactly is a Massively Multiplayer Online Game?

A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large numbers of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although there are games that differ.

The list of MMO’s that I started playing in order are:

• Ultima Online (released on September 24, 1997)
• Everquest (released on March 16, 1999)
• Asheron’s Call (released on November 2, 1999)
• Anarchy Online (released on June 27, 2001)
• Asheron’s Call 2 (released on November 22, 2002)
• Eve Online (released on May 6, 2003)
• World of Worldcraft (released on November 23, 2004)

I was working in Silicon Valley for a few years, and at this point, I had co-founded the Open Source web site SourceForge and then got laid off from VA Software. At the time I got laid off I received a really good package and was spending a lot of my time mostly playing Asheron’s Call and Anarchy Online.

As a matter of fact, I had stayed up all night playing both of those games when the first events of September 11th 2001 occurred.

A few months after the events of 9/11 I ended up started a game development studio called Damage Studios.

Located in San Francisco, California, Damage Studios is developing Rekonstruction as a persistent online title where a futuristic Earth must be rebuilt following a devastating asteroid collision.

To be continued

Well that’s the end of Part -1. I will be continuing the story about Damage Studios and Rekonstruction in a future post (Part 2) and then conclude my gaming journey.

thanks for reading.