...Mark.

God, I love MC Chris.

First blog entry here on GameSpot. Let me explain why I'm here as a Total Access Subscriber, and best to do this chronologically.

Late 1970s: I was still as smooth as a fattened Chihuahua. My best friend was this kid who was about 10 seconds away from the Rubik's Cube master's time. His dad ran the computing department at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, NY.

My friend, Kelly Sedinger, brought me into the lab one day to see this incredible "new thing".

For a few months after that, we MUD'd for hours a day.

To be honest, I was scared that I was interacting with other people in real time, so I usually just watched. (I'm still a SP fan to this date - real people suxxors).

After a while, Kelly's dad bought him a VIC-20, and we would play MULE, but mostly we would write text adventure games while trying to figure out sprites. His dad would also bring home these MASSIVE "personal computers" from college and Kelly and I would play these crazy text/graphical games on them that I doubt anyone else knows of. Well, outside of some Dracula adventure. Many of the other games we played were FRIGGIN' STUDENT MADE GAMES FROM AROUND THE WORLD!

Good lord, I had no fuzz, but damn did I have it good!

(During this time, we also spent a lot of time playing at my house with the 2600 or the original Pong home system. Later, friends would get Intellivision and Colecovision -- what is that D&D game where you shoot arrows in a mountain while a dragon roars? We also started acting out pencil and paper D&D in the foothills of the Appalacians using old clothes, sticks, and childish humor -- it wasn't until last year (at 34 YO) that I heard of LARPing. Those f'ing wannabes...)

I loved my buddy Kelly, but I wanted to up him one, so I had my parents buy me a Timex Sinclair 2068 (on sale for the holidays at the local AM&A's!)

Well, I got that computer and, as anyone with a good PC background knows, I couldn't get more than five F'ing games!

So I did two things: I bought a Spectrum 2000 ROM switch, and I wrote my own games.

Using "The Hobbit" as a start, I wrote many graphical text adventures, some with pretty solid imput hashing. I also made one of the first side-scrolling games. It was a jumping puzzle featuring an alien using four sprites (it was BIG), and the alien could walk in the center of the board, and the scene would scroll horizontally in and out. This was years before SMB. Unfortunately, using extended basic, this game took years just to scroll through an entire board. Decades if you jumped as you moved. Still, In a world of JSW, Ant Attack, and Beach Head, I think that I did a pretty freaking good job!

Unfortunately, my body became less smooth than before, and by the time I recovered from puberty, I had a mohawk, and tattooes, and piercings, and neat addictions, and a divorce, and a loss of 12 years.

Welllll... not quite. But that's enough for today. I just wanted to put this down as an intro to me -- mostly my lucky and ugly BG in gaming.

I'll write more later. Gotta get back to Fable or HL2E1.