Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Introductions

Video games have been a big part of my life ever since i was a small boy growing up on the north side of Milwaukee Wisconsin. My father was a custodian at a nearby elementary school. One day he was emptying the trash from one the offices, when he saw two rectangles lying at the bottom of the bin. He thought that i might like them so he brought them home for me to play with. What he brought home was a n old game boy and a green game boy color with copy of Mortal Kombat lodged in the cartridge slot. This was my first introduction to video games. I kicked and punched characters like like scorpion and sub-zero on a microscopic colorless screen and for a time, it was pretty rad. Eventually though i grew tired of  Mortal Kombat. I was tired of being confined to the similar looking arenas in the game. I wanted to explore. One day my father returned home from visiting my grandmother he snuck down to the basement. after a while he called me down stairs sitting in front of the television was a gray box That read Nintendo Entertainment System The television displayed duck hunt  my father handed me the gray light gun and i shot ducks down all day long. Just like mortal combat however it soon became tedious and i longed to explore more areas then duck hunt could provide. after playing with the buttons of the front of the NES i notice that the duck hunt cartidge contained another game. A game called Super Mario Bros. I loaded this game up and I was perplexed. I didn't even realize that you had to try to avoid the goombas by jumping over them. I thought you had to punch them like in mortal kombat or try to shoot the with the light gun. I figured it out eventually and after that I was hooked. It blew my mind that there was a world that had its own physics, logic and environment that was entirely different from reality. Every day from then on after school i went down to my basement and stomped goombas, collected coins, defeated bowser, and rage quit because the princess was in another castle. I navigated pits, found secret areas, broke bricks and powered up until I couldn't feel my thumbs. And to this day Super Mario Bros. is still one of my favorite games. I am 18 now . Since my first step into the virtual world I have amassed tons of knowledge regarding video games.So much that i think i can make them myself. This blog will document my journey to becoming a video game developer. I look forward to the future anxiously.
~Jon Harwood
01/29/2013