   What Was Your Inspiration?
  What inspired you to become a game developer hobbyist/professional/student/whatever?  It could be an image you saw when you were young, a speech you heard, a movie, story, etc.The reason I'm asking this is because I'm thinking about a career-related decision.Here is my inspiration story:When I was five (?), I visited my friend's house.  He was in the TV room playing a computer game on the computer.  When I saw it, I thought it was pretty bad.  I asked him why he was playing it and he said that it was made by one of his brother's friends from university.  I was amazed.  It was the first time that I realized that it was actually possible to create computer games, they didn't just appear out of nowhere in the store.  From then on, I wanted to be a game developer.[edited by - Rob Loach on February 5, 2004 2:34:52 PM]
  I guess I wasn''t really inspired to start developing games, but just to start programming .  When I was 7, my dad showed me this program that modeled something about waves (my dad''s a professor of costal engineering), I can''t rememeber exactly what it was, but anyway I asked him how he made it.  He introduced me to QBasic and my interest led on from there. ;  I am getting into robotics.  I dream of one day being confronted by one of my creations that has come back in time to kill me in order to save humanity.  If you can not establish my inspiration from that, then I feel sorry for you.CM ;  The biggest thing that sticks out in my memories was some contest that the magazine Nintendo Power held (this was during the early days of the 8-bit original Nintendo, I was in Junior High). The object was to design a game (just paper design, no code) and submit it; the winner would have his game produced. I didn''t actually enter the contest, but I did have a friend who tried. He ran around for a couple weeks, bringing stacks of graph paper to all of his study-hall classes, sketching out level designs and character graphics, etc... So I went home and started making a game for real, a seriously awful Gauntlet wannabe.I''d built small games before (cheesy RPG "You kill the slime!" type crap, on an old TI99-4A, starting when I was about 11) but didn''t really take it seriously until I watched him hard at work.In college, taking classes for Comp. Sci., I decided to use my powers for awesome, and made it a point to turn in projects that had a game-related basis, completing a small tile-based RPG for one of my final projects. While everyone else was painfully hammering out the standard queue implementation of airport line scheduling, I was building a queue-based event handling system for a game. Stuff like that.   GolemBlender--The Gimp--Python--Lua--SDLNethack--Crawl--ADOM--Angband--Dungeondweller;  HM... I''d have to say the release of the Doom source elevated me from just programming piddly little things to trying to actually code large progrects, but other than that, nothing. I grew up on computers that you could buy little code books for and make games out of those. After a while, I caught on to what some of the commands meant, and started modifying them to X extent.   I Want My Island"The same people who so greatly oppose slavery, so much that they are willing to kill over it... have just forced me to fight the battle for them."- Robert (I Want My Island) ;  Might and Magic 3 - I said ... this is some cool shit and I want to create something like this;  My dad bought me a computer that didn''t have games on it. We couldn''t buy a new game because our computer used 3.5-inch floppy drive but games were still distributed in 5.25-inch disks.Then I accidentally read a BASIC programming book, and read the best sentence ever "You can make your own games!" ;  The TI-83. ;  My friend and I had some competition going on in just about every area of our lives. Since we both have had a computer in our homes since the dawn of time we naturally pushed ourselves to learn more. Eventually I became interested more in the functional aspects of computers and he in the graphical aspects.   Colin Jeanne | Invader''s Realm;  The manual for Aces over Europe had some quotes from the developer... they seemed pretty whacky. That stuck in my mind. Just like the quotes in Wolf3D. 