Well, I'm glad you asked.
To make things simple: I'm an Australian university student with a mildly obsessive interest in history and video games twice my age.
And, before you ask: yes, Australia is a real place and no, we don't ride kangaroos to work. We actually ride emus.
For many years now my interests in history and gaming have intermingled, dragging me further into the annals of video game history. I always loved older games, growing up first with a NES, then SNES, then expanding into many consoles throughout my teenage years. But I often gravitated towards classic games, much more so as I got older (especially after chucking in multiplayer online FPS, devourer of time and controllers). I felt like I missed out on many classic titles due to my youth; never getting to experience the excitement of the arcade, and being too young to appreciate the games I did grow up with.
So, as an adult, I started going backwards – inspired by YouTube gaming channels that covered mostly retro gaming – into the backlog to discover all I missed out on. I started around the NES era, with games available on the Wii U Virtual Console and JRPGs from that era I could emulate. One fateful day I discovered the Atari Vault on Steam, and internally debated with myself on the idea of buying it out of sheer curiosity.
"These games are so old! Look at the graphics! I like old, but not that old! There's no way I would enjoy them, surely?" I thought to myself. Yet my curiosity got the better of me, and I purchased the collection and dived into Atari's greatest hits from the 70s and early 80s.
And I loved them.
It became an obsession for me, discovering a whole world I knew nothing about (other than Pong and Asteroids, of course) and finding a whole new array of classic games to enjoy. Adventure, Basketball, Superman, Battlezone, Night Driver, these are just some of the games that left a lasting impression on me. Then, as my love of history and curiosity around origins was blossoming at the same time, I became fascinated with the concept of the origins of video games. What was the first game? I had to know. I started diving into the history of the industry, discovering all these consoles and home computers I had never heard of, seminal arcade games, mainframes and, eventually, the beginning of the arcade and the earliest video games from the 1950s and 60s.
It was quite overwhelming, yet I wanted to try as many of these games as I could, and be as comprehensive as I could be. How could I organise such a monolithic task? In the end, I opted to compile everything into a single spreadsheet, ordered chronologically and by platform, using the year-by-year listings at Gaming-History (formerly Arcade-History) as my roadmap. I made it a quest to explore as much as I could. Later I also began adding ratings and rankings to each game to help summarise my thoughts on them.
Coming to today, that quest continues (and has been restarted several times), and my increased interest in writing (thanks much in part to university) has led me to here: blogging. I have dabbled in review writing over past year, but it seems less fun to keep it all to myself, so I decided, after being inspired by blogs such as CRPG Addict and Data Driven Gamer, that this is an ideal format for documenting my exploration of this wonderful hobby.
Well, that was a much larger introduction than I'd anticipated. But I digress, welcome to the quest, I hope you'll come along for the ride.
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