I've been enjoying games since the Atari...something or other in the late '80s. I loved playing Pole Position with a trackball, but didn't really play many games until the early '90s. My eye doctor recommended that I get a NES to help with my hand/eye coordination being off since I've only had one working eye since birth, so my mother and I went to the pawn shop to get one. We picked up Mario/Duck Hunt and Classic Concentration. They both got played a ton, and that store remained my major haunt for NES games for years. I've still got just about everything I bought from that place too.
In '95, a friend and I decided to make a fanzine, which I believe wound up with a single image from Killer Instinct traced onto yellow notebook paper and then maybe a few sentences on the game itself. That began a desire to write about gaming which I wouldn't actually fulfill until 2000 when I started writing for GameFAQs. That provided me with a start to write on staff for sites like Game2Extreme and VGPub before my biggest break - a gig with Hardcore Gamer Magazine.
I'll never forget how it felt to go to a store and see my name in print. It happened after my mother's first battle with cancer, so I'm glad she was able to see that before passing away from her second battle with it in 2008-2009. That time period was rough, but a great learning experience and allowed me to take a break from writing. I came back in theory a few months later, but I have next to no memory of anything I've written from that time period. There was so much going on, and while writing was an escape to some degree, it wasn't something I focused on. I did a lot for game-over during that time and don't remember any of it besides saying that I was good to go, reviewing the first XBLA Space Invaders game, and WWE Legends of WrestleMania.
I got back into writing on a regular basis again in 2012 when Hardcore Gamer came back, and look forward to making 2014 a year where I can finally turning writing about gaming from a passionate hobby into something I can make a decent living at. It's rewarding enough to cover stuff for the fun of covering it, but I'm definitely starting to see that I absolutely need to go as deep into the profession as I can if I want to make that goal a reality.
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