My love of gaming

Gaming has always been a part of my life, ever since I was old enough to remember. It all started with the Atari 2600 that belonged to my older brother and sister. The graphics and music were primitive to what we are used to now, but oh did I love them, I could spend hours playing those games. Then I discovered the NES when I was over at my babysitter's house when I was about 5. The quality of everything blew me away from what I was used to, Mario in my mind was probably the coolest character ever at that point in my life. Megaman took that throne away from Mario when I was about 8 and played Mega Man 2 for the first time, still probably my favorite video game character to this day.

I wasn't introduced to the world of the RPG until about 7th grade when I was staying over at a friend's house and his cousins brought over some of their Super Nintendo games. One of them was this little gem of a game called Final Fantasy III. I was blown away by the graphics, the music, the storyline, I had no idea that video games were capable of such a fascinating storyline akin to a movie or a book. It budded into a love of other games like it, Chrono Trigger being one of the big ones.

The video game RPG led me to the world of the MMO back in 1998 when I first discovered Ultima Online. I had no idea what to do when I first started playing the game, but it was such a deep and freeform world with plenty of player interaction if you wanted it, it was like nothing I had ever played before to that point.

It's a little backwards looking back at it now, but my love of RPGs and MMOs led me to the tabletop version of the games from whence they came. I never knew or wasn't friends with anyone back in school that played such games, but when I was hanging out at a gaming store during the week, a small group of people were rolling character for Dungeons & Dragons, and I was drawn in like a moth to candlelight. I could dictate the path my character took, which was a Human Paladin names Turalyon, and that level of control over my actions was truly liberating. It was even more so when I got my own collection of books and started running games with my friends. I have met a fair amount of people I would call good friends because of this game, and the friends that I had from work, it only served to solidify it even more.

It's that love of storytelling that eventually led me to the path of writing my own story in the form of a novel. True, it took the guidance of my sister to give me the motivation to start upon this endeavor, but the drive and stamina to keep it going comes from me and me alone. I can only hope that other people will love my stories as much as I enjoy crafting them.