When I was a young lass, my Dad bought a PlayStation. SCPH-9002, the first without a Parallel Port. As far as I know, it came with a demo for Gran Turismo, and later on we would also collect the full games of Ape Escape, Formula 1 '98 and V-Rally '97 Championship Edition and a demo for Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It was only a small collection, and that was probably appropriate enough. Gaming was a fun pastime, but it wasn't the be all, end all at that stage. Hell, It would be many years before I could actually *succeed* at any of those games, often floundering around and failing pretty damn hard. I spent a lot more time watching American and British TV/VHSs and hell, even playing sports and with LEGO.
I can still remember my 6th birthday night. I was at the table, and out came the presents. I ripped open one of the boxes, and there was something which I never really asked for, but was going to love all the same. It might have been because of my obsession with the "There Goes A Motorcycle" VHS from the library, but I digress.
Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000.
It's funny how a game that scored under 5/10 can really heavily wrap a kid into its world. Wasn't too good at the races, but I really got stuck into those freecross events. And then came the time when I discovered the track builder...it was small, it was super restricted, it was overall pretty stuffty but...I COULD MAKE GAME STUFF. That's a pretty powerful idea, as I rushed off to make epic straights with massive jumps. And idea that would last a long time.
For many of my early years, my brother and I were best friends everywhere except in games, which I would play and he'd be elsewhere. Soon though, he learned to join in, and our collective cries for a PS2 eventually won over Mum and Dad. Welcome home the PlayStation 2 Slim, and Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal (among other games). Can you believe that I could even finish the tutorial level when I first played? My brother and I got sucked into multiplayer easy, and we'd spend hours just messing about with the vehicles and environments, but neither of us really wanted to touch that "hard-as-balls" campaign.
Then I finished Veldin. And got angry at Florana. Another 6 months passed. I came back, finished Florana. Then I got angry at Marcadia. But I didn't quit. I fought back. Ratchet & Clank 3 was the end of the era where I wouldn't learn. It was the first game I beat. Not even the Rugrats games had I finished (but those were time-limited rentals, less about difficulty in that case).
I was addicted to victory.
At this point, I still wasn't interested in being a game developer; the idea wouldn't touch my mind for many more years, and at that point I'd tell friends, "Nah, it'd be too hard and probably not worth the effort." I was instead (embarrassingly) obsessed with my copies of Singstar: Rocks and Singstar: Pop, but I still made time for other games. I had a PC with games like LEGO Rock Raiders and Matchbox: Emergency Patrol, and on the PS2 my brother and I were working together on both of the LEGO Star Wars games and eventually Ratchet: Deadlocked. All was good in the Sony camp, until He arrived.
Nat.
My cousin was born here, 6 months before me, but moved to England as a little kid. He lived there most of his life, only having come here once before (and us being pretty solid friends in that time). Since I didn't have internet access at that point, we never communicated outside of his visit to Australia, and my parents forgot to let it slip that he was permanently moving back here, to live in a house a couple blocks away. I remember when I walked into the house after getting off the bus. Seeing the other car in the drive, crawling up the garage stairs to then see this lanky kid on my PS2, playing Deadlocked. It was a bit awkward at first, and there was only two controls so my brother had to play hotseat, but little did we know the adventure we were destined for.
I don't remember which came first. After introducing (and enticing) us to the original Xbox, for months, my cousin had been playing games like TimeSplitters 2 (with a map editor which I really, really became passionate with) and Battlefront with my uncle, my brother and I, and he wanted to try something new. Meanwhile, at my new High School, some of the upper-graders had warmed up to me and were introducing me to a little game they had managed to make portable, to avoid detection by the IT admin and so everybody could play LAN together.
They called it...Halo.
At college, it was Halo Portable; a modified version of Custom Edition by the local legend Shirving Sharma (which I would later make an additional hack of to rename the executable after a core system process for further hidden detection and to add some custom maps I found on somebody's USB, such as the classic Extinction), and at my cousin's place it was Halo 2 on the Xbox. We made so many inside jokes, and I quickly climbed ladders as I became more and more obsessed. It wasn't too long before, at a sleep-over, I made an earnest attempt at Halo 2's story mode, and while I didn't understand any of what was going, it wouldn't be long before I was begging my brother (who somehow had cash and I didn't?) to buy us a full copy of Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC. I even told him about the Extinction map we had at school, and how we could fly the pelicans.
It was long after my cousin had gotten his Xbox 360 and Halo 3 that my brother and I followed suit. My parents had seen my crazy love for that damn PC copy of Halo CE, and they really needed a way to get me off the PC and back onto the consoles as they wanted to use the PCs. It was Christmas, 2008, and alongside the Xbox 360 Arcade, one of my presents was Halo 3: Limited Edition. The one that came with that special Xbox disc filled with development documentaries. Ones that I obsessed over. That was the turning point. When I reverted everything I had said about being a game developer. I wanted to be a Bungie employee.
The next few years were a flurry of obsession. I learnt how to use the Halo Editing Kit and got my first taste of scripting and modeling (using a program called GMax to substitute for the long gone free 3DS Max). I revisited a community of classic LEGO Game modders I had once browsed to on the Internet and within months figured out a looming question on how to add new characters to LEGO Rock Raiders, I began peering into the depths of hex editing as I tried to learn more about how Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords ticked, I built the world's biggest amusement park (complete with police checkpoint for investigating trucks for drugs) in Trainz Simulator 2009 and a copy of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis which I goaded my Mum into buying me couldn't spend more than 5 minutes being freshly installed before I tried to throw some new tweaks at its unlocked configuration files. But that wasn't enough. I was only taking other's work and changing it.
2009 saw me producing my very first game. It was a crappy little point-and-click adventure game, but it set in motion a chain of events that put me on track. When my giant plans for game overhauls like "Final Dawn" (Halo) and Project: SKN (LEGO Rock Raiders) fell through, in the ashes I would be left with one strong as hell team, and we knew what we wanted to do; we wanted to make a Halo machinima to rule all machinima. Did it work? 8 years later, I can confirm for you that it didn't, but we had some bloody fun nights together, where I got a handle on games like Mass Effect, and I learnt about new tech and techniques for making and recording stories.
As I would come through college, my tastes would change shape, and I would experiment with other games (such as maps for Portal 2), but nowadays it's less about modifying and more about learning. Rather than replacing everything with my own vision, I now study to see what the greats have laid before us. And sometimes, games just help give me a purpose for life; dealing with a bit of an existential crCIA was hard until games reinjected that fuel and fire that I needed.
It's really hard to believe that's the journey I took to come to the understand I have over this industry and the medium. It's also sometimes hard to appreciate that my strongest relationships came from games like Assassin's Creed, Blockland, the Grand Theft Auto series and all the games I mentioned previously. Hell, the only way my brother and I can communicate nowadays is if we somehow end up in a round of Halo together, but those moments are great. I'm living a pretty good life, and it's not too long before gaming stops influencing me, and I instead start influencing it.
Once upon a time, I sat there with a PS1 and a handful of game demos. Now I own every top console of this generation, a gaming PC that makes others jealous and a massive Steam library. Times have changed.
Thanks, Video Games.
PS: Yes, this is a watered-down, highly summarised version. Sorry to all those quality (and budget) titles I missed out commenting on.
