My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.
I'm part of that original generation that came up playing video games, that pumped a lot of our allowance into video games. We financed the rise of video games. I started playing them in the Straw Hat Pizza Palace at the Carriage Square Mall in Oxnard, CA.
When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me.
From the time I was a kid, I was always interested in any and all kinds of new business ideas.
My earliest interest in game design came when I was in primary school, and my parents bought a Commodore 128 computer. I taught myself to write programs in BASIC, and then I made my own games.
It was something of a personal challenge for me to come up with a business suitable for the Internet world and the Internet age.
I was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform.
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years.
The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women.
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