First of all, my bank account numbers, social security number and mother's maiden name--ur, uh. . .
Let's start this again. . .
I was born at a rather young age in the little known city of Los Alamitos, California (a suburb of Anaheim). However, I have little memory of southern California since I moved to Orem, Utah at the ripe age of 18 months.
When I was four, I moved to Logan, Utah--which is near the east edge of the Utah-Idaho border. Logan is quite a remote spot, about a 30 minute drive from the nearest freeway. The main two roads in and out of Logan both run through winding canyons. The city is towered on three of four sides by dry, rocky mountains. (In fact, they are the Rocky Mountains!) Maple trees are the most common variety in the actual city, although you'll find a lot of pine forests in the mountains.
I lived in Logan to the age of 18, which means that I went through all of my pre-college schooling there.
From a young age, I always had a strong interest in art and storytelling. At scout camps, I was always known as the guy who told ghost stories. One of my favorite pass-times during my elementary school days was folding over sheets of paper, stapling them and making books--with stories and illustrations that I provided.
Our family purchased an Atari 2600 about as soon as they came out. Naturally, I began spending many hours--alone or with my friends--playing those blocky games, like Surround and Adventure.
At the local grocery store, in the summer before fifth grade (we're talking 1981), I discovered PAC-MAN--that little yellow circle that gobbled up dots and blue ghosts. All the bright colors, the sound effects, the intermissions. . .I was hooked! Then came Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Berzerk, and dozens upon dozens of other arcade games that I couldn't get enough of.
Naturally, I wanted to make games like that myself. I started by making board game equivalents of my favorite video games. (The games I made were actually quite popular among my classmates in the sixth grade.)
But the place I really wanted to make games was the computer.
The first chance I got to use a computer was in sixth grade, at school. They had a couple Commodore Pets, with audio cassette players (for the storage of programs) and itty-bitty monocrome screens. In a seventh grade math class, I actually got to do a little BASIC programming on a Pet.
Then in the eighth grade I took my first official programming class, using Basic on an Apple II. I continued taking programming courses in the ninth, tenth and eleventh grade. By grade 11, I was using Pascal.
For Christmas, when I was in the ninth grade, my parents bought me a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. I can't even count the hours I spent writing games on that thing. The big fad by then was text adventure games (like Zork), and I must have written about 20! The Rainbow Magazine (written for the TRS-80) had a tradition of holding an annual adventure game contest and publishing all the winners' games. Though I never contributed, I purchased years 1 through 3--about 70 games, and I played every one!
My cousin, who lived about two hours away, had an authentic IBM PC, and the two of us spent a lot of time writing games for that platform as well.
Well, that was my first passion growing up.
The second was role-playing games.
My very first taste of paper-and-dice role-playing, at the age of 12, was actually a homemade espionage game inspired by TSR's Top Secret. My cousin (the same one) had enjoyed playing TS so much that he put together a simplistic imitation of it and began acting as GM (Game Master). We set up my character in the afternoon and spent a good evening going through a simple adventure where I had to infiltrate a weapons black market and put it out of business. Afterwards, my cousin showed me some maps of a secret base he was designing for his next adventure. I remember him describing how he was creating a number of security guards with different abilities and personalities.
It was only weeks later that my cousin forked over a few bucks for the real Top Secret. Afterwards followed many dazzling days and nights in Sprechenaltestelle, Communist Hungary, and my cousin's own masterpiece: Volcania Island. The contents of the adventures ranged from kidnapping and defection to counterfeiting and refugee slaving rings.
Needless to say, it was one heavy load of fun.
It was about a year later that I purchased Star Frontiers (Knight Hawks first--by mistake) and tried my own hand at being GM, beginning a golden age of heavy gaming that would last about six years!
[To visit my extensive Star Frontiers page, click this line]
Along the way, I also purchased a less enduring role-playing game called The Adventures of Indiana Jones, and I ran many gaming sessions with it as well. As a player, I tried out Gamma World, Top Secret S.I. (the updated version) and Marvel Super-Heroes.
My role-playing and arcade game hobbies were funded initially by a paper route and later by a job pushing carts for a large grocery store. I pushed so many carts that I ended up partially tearing a ligament in my right knee. Once I got over the surgery, the grocery store transferred me to their produce department.
A big change took place in my life just before the age of 19, as I left the country for two years to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My job, schooling and hobbies were set aside as I spent the next 24 months representing the church in the French West Indies--more specifically on the Caribbean islands Martinique and Guadeloupe. There I learned French (and a little Creole), in which I am still fluent today.
[To visit the French West Indies Mission web page, click this line]
The entire computer world had changed when I got back from my mission in 1991.
Hard drives, which were once rare luxuries, were now standard equipment on
every machine. With the exception of the Apple Macintosh, any kind of
computer that wasn't an IBM compatible had VANISHED! And what was this new
CD-ROM stuff people were talking about?
Needless to say, it took me a while to get back up to speed.
Once I was back in the US, I resumed my job in the produce business and went to Utah State University for a year, taking a lot of computer and math classes.
Then, as happens sometimes, I got married.
My new bride and I moved to the Dallas area, where I continued my schooling
while working full time in a grocery store. About a year before I graduated,
I took my first technical job on the engineering team of an electronics
manufacturer called McDonald Technologies International (MTI). No relation to
the hamburger place, by the way.
My programming language of choice by this time was C, and in my free time I converted a lot of my old TRS-80 adventure games into C programs that I compiled for DOS. The ones that I finished are available for download:
The problem was, nobody was interested in text adventures any more. And I finally admitted it.
Once I got my degree, my wife and I moved back to Utah, where I accepted a software engineering position with a data entry company called Unibase. It was at this same moment that our daughter, Colombe, was born.
At Unibase I advanced my programming skills, moving into Windows development,
Visual Basic, C++ and MFC.
A year later I left Unibase to work for AMX, a control systems company. With AMX I designed software to control fully automated audio-visual networks that were installed at large schools and corporate office buildings. I did some very heavy work with Visual C++ and MFC, and eventually progressed into using COM, the ATL and Java.
In 1998, I changed jobs again, taking a senior software engineering position with Callware Technologies, a telephony software company.
I'm doing a lot of big things today.
Still, that urge to write computer games persists. . .
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Star Frontiers: Now and Forever