whapakk.

Stabbing skeletons was my childhood pastime.

It started way back in preschool: I played a lot of DOS games back then, from the now-stupid math games, to Prince of Persia and Commander Keen. The whole programs we used to play with were under 2MB, and the secondary storage device of choice was the floppy disk. I encountered several (huge) disks when I was a kid, but eventually they were phased out in favor of the more compact 3.5-inch high-density diskettes. Among my favorite games then were California Games and DuckTales: The Quest for Gold.

Anyway, early in grade school I got my first console systems: the Atari Video Computer System and the ever-so-popular Family Computer (NES). I got to play with the classics: Super Mario Bros., Tennis, Ice Climber, Excitebike, Baseball, Contra, and Battle Tank on NES; for the most part, I ignored my Atari.

I found the "Weekend Warrior" difficulty setting unforgettable.

About this time I also started playing Wolfenstein 3D, probably the first PC game I could say I got addicted to. It was violent, it was gory, but it was cool as hell. I’d never move on to love its successor, Doom, the way other kids my age would. Instead, I’d learn to appreciate back-end development, and while the other kids furiously gunned down their AI buddies, I’d start learning how to program my own games.

My cousin, Jop, introduced me to BASIC programming. I was in fourth grade, and about then (or maybe after a year, I can’t recall) we had classes on Logo, a computer programming language known for its “turtle graphics.” Later in school we’d tackle the already outdated GW-BASIC, but by then I’ve already had a background with QBasic, the language which replaced the one we were being taught in school.

We all used to love banana-throwing Gorillas.

Not only was I ahead of the class, but unknowingly I was ahead of the whole curriculum. By end of that school year I was already programming quizzes that I’d use as reviewers for quarterly major exams. The chances of me getting below 100% in identification exams (no matter how long they were) were so slim as all of the questions were easy to determine from the book; I’d simply input them all in a program and study it until I got hungry.

That much practice in programming led me to produce my first game the following summer break. I had two major addictions then: Choose Your Own Adventure books and Magic: The Gathering trading cards. It made a lot of sense to me to develop a game that would narrate a story CYOA-style, but where the reader had running stats (just like in an RPG): life points, poison counters, and strength points, ideas I got from Magic: The Gathering. I remember finding the whole game absurd once I finished it – a Choose Your Own Adventure story with loads of random battles? It was one weird Frankenstein of a game.

After grade school, it was a hodgepodge of computer languages: QBasic, dBase, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Visual Basic, and HTML. It’s so messy I’m having a hard time recalling everything I did with them. So, I’ll just leave that story for another time.