The Gamer
I am a gamer in my truest form. I have loved games since the day I got my Nintendo and fired Up Mario/Duck Hunt. I had played with a Atari 6600 beforehand which was nice but the blocks didnt quite do it for me. 8-bit as minor as it seems today was a big step up. My obsession just kept growing with the technology, I mainly followed the Nintendo side of games with a little sega thrown in for good measure. Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 managed to squeeze their way in before i laid my hands on a computer.
I was late getting into the computer world, right around when quake 2 came out was when I entered the fray. Almost instant addiction to online mulitplayer games came. I played Quake2 more than I have any other game. It was mostly the modifications to the game that I could download and play with others that would change the game. One of my favorites was jailbreak, It turned it from deathmatch to once you die you go to prison and can try to escape.
Playing with games eventually lead my to be interested in how they make them and how computers can do all the magic that they do. Which lead me to programming, I started in 11th grade with learning some BASIC and a little C. That little taste made me want to learn more about the computer languages that take numbers and conditions and make them into programs and do whatever they want/are built for.
I was determined I was going to be a game programmer and design games for a living. So off to school I went, Full Sail Real World University in orlando florida to be exact. There i sped through the game design program and the high speed pace they operate at. When I came out i realized it was a lot more than I signed up for. I still love programming but that level of programming was a little overwhelming, I loved it but it seemed like more work than it was worth in the end. Theres nothing cooler than seeing your work come to life but the vast amount of work involved in a single game overwhelmed me.
Still wanting to use my programming skills I started coding for the web, mainly using ColdFusion. Its like game programming in some aspects but it is much more data driven. Programming games is much more flashy and entertaining, but the end result is months down the line. With web programming it is much more instant gratification. I plan on moving into flash, actionscript and flex in the near future.