Kingdom Hearts 2. I think my parents randomly got it with the ps2 slim they got me for christmas or a birthday when I was a kid. I knew nothing about final fantasy or anime, but I absolutely loved disney movies. I don’t really know too well why it got me hooked so much. I had a head injury when I was 15, and have heavy amnesia of my life before it. The fact I remember so much about that time is really a testament to the impact it had on me.

I remember the aesthetic was completely new to me and I thought it was really cool. In hindsight final fantasy characters hanging out in disney movies is pretty weird, but they just looked like really cool guys fighting evil in the background of the movies.

Roxas’ story was also super compelling for kid me, the entire prologue felt dreamlike, emotional, and thought provoking. It was like I was playing a novel. For context, the games I had played up until that point were essentially just pokémon, spyro, smash bros, and mario kart. So the idea that a game could be emotional and have an interesting story was completely new to me.

Now I can see the flaws and oddities in the series, but I still love it and it’s had a ridiculous impact on my life. I sometimes worry a little that if the people in my life played the series they might see the inspiration for so many habits I have now and pretty much my entire sense of style is heavily influenced by the idea of Tetsuya Nomura design blended with disney vibes.

Probably Sonic Mega Collection because it really got me into platformers and made me into a Sonic fan. Kinda solidified my taste in games a little as I’ll gladly take a family friendly platformer like Sonic or other titles like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger or Yooka-Laylee over an online PVP game like any call of duty because Sonic taught me to love platformers more, even to this day.

Also kinda solidified the fact that I’d rather casually play through a lot of games and not be that guy who tries to be perfect at a game. That caused me to get where I am today where I’ll play co-op in a game but avoid full-on PVP with a random group of people because I know they’ll mop the floor with me and I’d just end up quitting before giving the game a fair shot.

I think Warcraft III, it built a certain mixture of gameplay and lore that one way of another shaped all the games I regrettably sunk way too many hours into:

• World of Warcraft
• League of Legends
• Dota

I would say Shufflepack which made me into a kid that wanted to played videogames all the time, but I feel that has not “influenced” me much, and any other title would have had the same effect.

Dwarf Fortress. That’s where my mild obsession with technological bootstrapping and self-sufficiency started.

Although I think I was more of a tween or teen when I discovered it. If I needed to be an actual child, it’s harder, because Mario Kart and JumpStart influenced nothing. Probably RuneScape; it’s fuzzy, but I think that was my first taste of internet culture.

The edutainment games presented by Germany’s beloved children’s show host Peter Lustig, published by Terzio.

The tie-in video games to both his TV series Löwenzahn as well as the Swedish Gary Gadget (Mulle Meck) books were elevated by his voice clips and I still quote them regularly. They really put a lot more effort into these games than anything I’ve ever experienced, there was fucking free DLC for Gary Gadget if you visited their website and had your father put some files in the right folder.

The worlds themselves both star an excentric man tinkering on inventions, but while sometimes fantastical they are more grounded that the world of Peterson and Findus. They teach children about community and physics, similar to the book “the way things work” - guess who presented its animated show of the same name in Germany?

Halo 1-3

They are some of the best games ever, playing halo 1 for the first time after getting an xbox for christmas hit me like a freight train and to this day my love of fps games is in large part to the endlessly interesting tactics in halo multiplayer and how much fun I had/have learning them.

Playing a big team battle halo infinite seems like replaying a memory I never actually had in the best way.

Still to this day even if I haven’t played halo in years, I will kick your butt.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

As a child, has to be Diablo 2. I had no idea what I was doing but I had fun. And it got me into reading, actually. I read some books now and then, but wasn’t an avid reader. But when I played Diablo 2, I found out there are books from the Diablo world and got one. I remember when I got home I was like “ok, since I got the book I will read one chapter and then go to playing” - well I didn’t turn on the PC for 3 days until I have finished the book. And then went to get more.

Another was World of Warcraft (though I was not exactly a kid by then). It made me fall in love with MMOs, a genre which I still love (though no game holds me today quite as WoW did - still hope for one though). And thanks to it I got to know people I’m friends with to this day.

DOOM. It blew my mind when i played it. I learned a new genere, how fast paced a game can be and how clever map design makes a good game. I also learned about shareware which lead to a broader interest in the internet as a whole. Later i got a computer with a soundcard and when i fired up DOOM with music for the first time, it felt like a revelation.

It wasn’t my first RPG, but playing through Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) in middle school made me fall in love with music.

I ended up asking my parents for a digital piano and acoustic guitar which eventually spiraled into download ModPlug Tracker to sequent music. I didn’t have a powerful computer back then so I’d record one-shot samples from my digital piano and spent a few hours each day trying to create my own music.

I stopped recording around 2012 because I got really sick and music didn’t pay the bills. I’m a father now with a 5 year old son and I’m looking forward to sharing my love of music with him.

If anyone is interested, I can share one of my very early tracks and one of my last recordings to listen to. It’s one of my favorite things to do, sharing the culmination of my work.

Ocarina of Time - it was mindblowing to have the open world at the time (I didn’t play Ultima 7 until much later) and the music is incredible.

ZZT!

This is the game that got Tim Sweeney the cash he needed to develop Jill of the Jungle and then go off of that success to bring Epic (Epic Megagames at the time) into the successful company it became. But I don’t care about that because I never played Unreal or Fortnite.

ZZT came with its own editing software. Not just so you could place pieces around the board and make mazes or whatever, it contained a fairly robust scripting language you could use to make all sorts of things way beyond the scope of the original game the editor came with. Whole online communities grew up around creating and sharing these homemade games, first on BBSes and then on AoL fora and eventually on a dedicated website that’s still around. Because the game/editor were distributed as shareware, there was almost no barrier to entry, and we were all just churning with ideas about how to break the engine and push the bounds of the software, of gameplay, and if narrative convention.

It was one of the most creative and community-focused times of my life, and fostered my lifelong passion for game design, something I still do as a hobby.

Ultima IV… It had a virtue system so you had to watch your behavior throughout the game to reach the embodiment of 8 virtues (Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, and Humility) to be become the Avatar, only after which you could enter the Abyss to finish the game.

It was a lesson on how to be a good person.

Myst, I wanted to write books that linked to worlds. Figured the closest thing was programming.

Civilization 1, patients, economics, frustration.

Doom, was just a shit ton of fun and got me into networking so we could play against each other.

E.V.O. Search for Eden on the Super Nintendo. It sparked my interest in evolution and honestly a fascination about the origins of “things”.