I've watched with a kind of wary eye how gaming has progressed. I was there at the beginning with Pong in the arcade, and a lot of my great childhood memories were around a 'Tempest' machine.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was born in 1957, so when I was a kid, there wasn't anything called a video game. When 'Pong' came out, it was awesome.
I actually have the Arcade PC at home, and it has 5,500 games on it. Everything from the old school, Galaga, Tron, Missile Command, anything you can think of, they're all on there. I love the old school games.
My parents played bridge, and I remember being fascinated watching them. I sometimes got a chance to sit in on a hand, which I loved. But then I didn't actually play on my own for about 30 years.
It seemed like, when I was a teenager, there was a video game everywhere: they were in 7-Elevens, movie theatres, pizza shops; they were everywhere.
It was a great experience for a kid, because it was a bunch of kids playing on pirate ships and water slides, so looking back on it, it was the fondest experience of my childhood.
When I was a kid, I had an Atari 2600, and I would play Pac Man, Frogger, all that kind of stuff. And I did enjoy going to the arcade.
I absolutely knew that I wanted to play role-playing games when I saw a friend of mine playing 'Bard's Tale 2' on his Commodore 64.
The gaming world is a complete mystery to me! Well, I did play Pac Man and Frogger using big machines at an arcade back in the '80s.
I have fond memories of the development work that led to a lot of great things in modern gaming - the intensity of the first person experience, LAN and Internet play, game mods, and so on.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.