A 12-year-old boy shouldn’t have owned Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but I did. It would end up being, in slightly hyperbolic terms, the game that set my life in motion. Being a regular reader of gaming magazines since I first owned an N64 aged 8, I decided to have a crack at a review – which led to another review, then another and so on until I had a little folder filled with some of the absolute worst reviews ever written.
I liked writing them though, and as I grew up I made blogs and found forums so I could share my writing. Feedback was either negative or non-existent as is the way of the internet but I persisted. It was only when the time came to choose what I wanted to study at university that I thought anything more of it.
Like so many people my age I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Choosing to study English or History or Law might have made my parents happy but as was the way with me at the time I chose the path that sounded the most fun.
I chose journalism of course and despite having no idea at the time it was the best decision I ever made. The course was definitely for me, it may have taken us over a year to gel as a group of people but the friends I made on that course will stay with me for many, many years. The content of the course too was a wonderful and welcome mix of fun and interesting, aided no end by down-to-Earth lecturers.
At first I continued to add to my existing video game blog but soon I wanted something new. I started to blog about journalism, the media, etc. For a marked module of the course I even made a blog called Celebrity Hate Machine which did exactly what it said on the tin and got me a good mark to boot. My focus switched to films half way through my second year and I started blogging about those instead. Consequently games fell by the wayside, as I’m sure they do at some point in the life of any gamer.
When a gamer moves out for the first time, particularly to a student household, you’d think they’d play a load more games than they ever did at home. I thought this too, reinstalling Knights of the Old Republic on my laptop, downloading Deus Ex from Steam and buying a keyboard and mouse so I could play them right. My aunt and uncle (incredibly generous people) thought so too and bought me an Xbox Elite as a moving in present! Hot damn!
I moved out a few weeks after the release of Halo Reach. I played only a few hours of that game while in my student house and not much of anything else. I restarted Mass Effect 2, put ten hours into it and bought/completed Portal 2. That’s it for a whole nine months. I fell out of love with games and my initial desire to write about them waned considerably, replaced instead with films, an alternative with more opportunities.
That was until the final few months of 2011. It was an amazing time to be a gamer and to not be modest at all a great time to be me! My internship at Yahoo! writing about film and television had started and AAA tiles of AAA quality were being released left right and centre. I fell in love all over again and that coupled with my new found taste for everyday journalism made me set one of my five goals for 2012. To be paid to write about video games.
That’s why I’m here. I want to write about games again and this is the best place to start. Forgive me a whole post about me but this simply serves as back-story before I get down to business. Bring it on!
