As mentioned previously, I love video games. I suck at them, but that really has very little effect on my overall enjoyment of them. Then came The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This is a game unlike anything I had played up to this point. You don’t start out playing some predefined character created and designed by some game designer. The game has an inherent freedom that I was unaccustomed to. In the first 5 minutes of the game you get to choose your name, race, appearance, attributes, skills and abilities. You can choose some predefined classes that will give you a general set of stats, skills and abilities or you…

Summer 1977, I’m five years old and my Dad takes me to the theater for the single most significant event in cinematic history… Star Wars. There just are not enough words to express the impact that movie had on a young boy in the late 70′s. It was like nothing we had ever seen before. We had Lost in Space, Space 1999, Star trek, things like that, but Star Wars was on a completely different level. It was action and adventure, lasers and space ships and the ultimate weapon… the lightsaber. I watched the movies, bought the merchandise, got into lengthy arguments about why Star Wars is better than Star…

Enter my first PC. A generic clone PC running a 386DX-40. It was a monster (to me at the time), that could do anything from running Windows 3.1 to connecting to the Internet to Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein was a game-changer, it revolutionized PC gaming in so many ways. Graphics, gameplay design, even the ability to modify the game and share your own levels with others. It ushered in the age of the First Person Shooter, a genre which has dominated the gaming landscape ever since. Battlefield, Call of Duty, the list goes on, they all owe their existence to Wolfenstein. And I played it, I played it a lot… but…

Okay, so I guess I could be called a recreational gamer. I like playing video games, I’m not good at it, but I like it none the less. I guess it all started back in the late 70′s. Like many other GenX’ers, I started out with Pong. It wasn’t really a great game, but it was the game. Pong opened the door to other video games to follow, it was my gateway-drug. Next came the ubiquitous Atari 2600 (which actually had Pong as well) and the plethora of games for it, all full of beeps and boops and bright colors. In hindsight, they really were not that good. Sure, Pole…