At PAX East, there was a panel where a bunch of devs talked about their first games. They asked me and a few others to send in a video… and this is what I sent them.

The saga of how I managed to make it, though, is a little more intricate, involving copying all my Atari 8-bit floppies to PC. I used the USB SIO2PC interface from Atarimax to connect the floppy drive direct to the PC.  I then captured video directly within Altirra. Some of the disks were dead, alas, but I was able to recover about a half dozen games and partial games that I wrote when I was 14 and 15. Maybe at some point I’ll do posts on them.

You also get to see a glimpse of what was my real bootcamp in game design. It wasn’t the videogames. Frankly, I wasn’t a good enough programmer to make great games, really, and so a lot of the games were clone-like in a lot of ways. A truly ridiculous amount of them consist of nothing more than the title screen. No, it was the boardgames I did as a kid that in retrospect really taught me the basics… I must have made several dozen, and they’d get playtested during recess periods at school. At some point, I will definitely do a post about those. I still have many of them.