I heard you’re player?
I am a player. I am a gamer. I am a game addict since I was a kid. I love playing games and whatever it is, playing game is always fun. My first game experience was of course, Tetris. I played it through some kind of gamewatch and it was my first console ever. My first crush.
How did I able to own that console? Well, I traded that exact console with one of my body part, I paid it with my genitals. Or circumcision, we shall call it. At the age of 4, I proposed my parents with a condition that if they want to circumcise me they had to buy me a gamewatch. A Tetris console along with 41 other games in it, and that was a non-argumentative proposal, of course.
I came from a likely poor family and it wasn’t really easy to get that console. When my friend bought and played with kites, I was trained to make a kite. I remember my first kite, my father made it and he even draw a picture of Donald Duck on it. In the end, I found my self busy being a kite-seller.
And few years later when Tamiya wave was trending, my father made me a toycar from cigarette packs, orange peels, and woods instead. That’s probably the reason why I was so happy to get my first Tamiya with my own money when I was entering college. I also like to play board games such as Snakes and Ladders, as well as Monopoly. I even learned the word ‘mortgages’ and the obligation to pay tax from Monopoly.
And do you familiar with Ding-Dong? It’s kind of an arcade game, in my hometown we called it that way. A game console where we have to put some coins in to play. 100 Rupiah if I’m not wrong. My house located in the suburbs and it’s kinda far from the city, and some days I walked 8 kilometers by foot just to play with the Ding Dong. I saved my transportation cost in order to have more money and more money means more games.
Once upon a Gameboy era not so long after Ding-Dong craze, Gameboy rentals were very popular here in my town, yet too bad the renter only went to my friends’ school, not mine. So everyday after school I visited my friends’ school to rent the Gameboy and play with it.
And then it finally came, the gorgeous-God-gracious Nintendo.
The memory is still so clear to me I remember my neighbour owned a Nintendo and I stood in front of my neighbour’s TV all day watching him playing Mario Kart. For weeks I was just standing there, watching him, doing nothing, not even offered to play. I was so in awe with Nintendo. The games, the visualisation, the technology, and even the form of its beautiful joystick.
Perhaps, that moments in between my awes, I found my true love.
Fast forward to high school, I learned a little bit about programming using Visual Basic and my first project was to make a card game using Visual Basic. I forgot why I had to make that game at the first place, but yeah anyway, I made it.
Praise the Lord, few years later, I passed the exam and went to college. I took a double degree program with physics and computer science as my majors. I learned to use my programming ability to help other people in terms of education. I was trained to be an educator, tutor, lecturer, mentor, and I have to say I do love sharing my thoughts with others. I also learned to make modules and curriculums in a form of a game. Not only digital games, but board games as well. I learned a lot and I got so many things from that: experiences, friends, knowledge, and money.
Few years had passed after that, I was also having experience of working in a multimedia game maker company and in the same time being a freelance developer for some advertising games. Still learning from games after games, I am trusted to be a game developer consultant for some brands and this made me truly dive into the industry. The industry I am falling for since I was a boy.
From some things that made me fall in love, game is probably my first. And being able to be in the industry is one of my way to turn my childhood dreams and wishes into reality.
Yeah, so I heard you’re player? Relax, I am game developer. I create your game.
