1980 - London, UK.

Dad brought home a little toy, a wonder in modern electronics - the ZX80. I had no idea what it was, but things got interesting when he started hooking it up to the TV. After a bit of fiddling, the screen turned full white, with a little cursor in the corner, blinking patiently, awaiting input.

As any 5-year-old would, I pressed the buttons at random, easily amused by the text that appeared on the screen. Leaving the tiny keyboard at my mercy, Dad pored over the thin, and presumably concise manual.

"Type this in..." he said, giving direction to my wanton button mashing. Under his instruction, I keyed in 3 lines.

10 PRINT "EUGENE ";

20 GOTO 10

RUN

Whoa! The whole screen filled up with my name, over and over and over again. Oh what a sense of power! My name, on TV! From that moment onward, my destiny was sealed. Computers would become my life.

After the ZX80, came the ZX81. After the ZX81 came the ZX Spectrum. For the latter two, clever old Dad published a book containing 50 educational games under the name of Educare. Each one was meticulously QA'ed by yours truly.

1986 Tiong Bahru, Singapore

The Atari 2600 I received as a birthday present from my parents brought me into the world of console gaming. I would spend hours playing games like Joust and Word Zapper till my hands ached. Prior to this, the only computer exposure I got was to the Spectrum, and fun "games" like Wordstar, Multimate and Multiplan for the IBM XT.

This would turn out to be the only console I''ve ever owned to date. Quite amazing for what would become a game developer. Nope, don''t have a Playstation or an XBox or anything from Nintendo. I wonder if that will soon have to change...

1989 - Tiong Bahru, Singapore

I inherit my parent's office computer, the old IBM XT. I also get the two big manuals. One on how to use DOS, and the other on how to program in BASICA. Nostalgia from the Spectrum days lead me to cobble together my first independantly developed game.

It turned out to be something like Araknoid without the bricks, or PONG without the other paddle. It utilized full ASCII graphics, with the smiley face (char code 2) as the ball. It had sound effects, beeping and blooping whenever the ball hit a wall or the paddle. It had in-game music, a little rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, between every level. It had 10 levels, where the ball got faster and occasionally changed direction mid-air.

After this, I would attempt a more ambitious platform game. Alas, it never materialized, succumbing to my short attention span and lack of focus.

1993 - Anglo Chinese Junior College, Singapore

Somewhere along the line, I inherited a 386 PC from somebody. Full color graphics! A schoolmate sold me a copy of Star Wars:X-Wing for $13. It was pirated, of course, or I would never have been able to afford it. But at the time, I didn''t know what piracy was. Neither did most people. But I learned very quickly.

Soon, I was buying games straight from the source, from a non-descript shop. The shop and many others have long since closed down. This happened when the issue of software piracy became known to the public eye, and the heavy fist of the government scattered the underground market.

During this time, I also discovered what a modem is and started connecting to Bulletein boards, reading inane posts, and playing inane text-based games like Red Dragon. The feeling of reaching out and connecting to somebody or something out there was empowering, and only grew stronger when I eventually gained access to the Internet.

1998 - Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Surprise suprise, I ended up reading Computer Engineering at university. By that time, I pretty much knew how to program and to be honest did not spend as much time as I should have on the course material. There were two things that occupied much of my time.

The first was Scrabble and Boggle, games that I played competitively in on a regular basis. We had a great team that was both cohesive and hardworking. These games, particularly Scrabble, were dissected and analyzed. I wrote software to solve Boggle boards, and to produce word study lists from lexical algorithms. Fun times indeed.

My other major preoccupation was the Leviathan. This is a text-based MUD. This was very handy as I could play undetected from HP-UX consoles in the school labs. Lab tech must have thought I was extraordinarily hardworking. Starting off as a player, I soon became a wizard (programmer), then an Elder (more privileged programmer).

Going under the avatar name Clotho, I created first a mini-area as a part of my wizard-initiation rites. This mainly consisted of a few rooms and a few characters. It wasn''t extensive, but hearing people talk and rant and rave about your work over the public Gossip channel is positively intoxicating.

After successful intitiation, I went on to create a house dispensing machine. Available only to higher level players, it spat out a virtual non-descript brown package for a price. Armed with this, a player could go to any room and deploy the package, creating a house which they can customize the look and feel of, both interior and exterior.

That being done, I went on to create a very ambitious arena, to replace the existing one which was showing its age. I would support elo-based rankings, team vs team combat, restoration of inventory upon exit, NPCs in the arena, intra-team communications and a lot more. However, after completion, there were apparantly not enough wizards at hand to QA it. It sat for months in my private test area. After a while, I left the MUD to go on its own way. It survives till today, and I think my code is still sitting somewhere in there, unused. What a pity!

2004 - Nexgen Studio, Singapore

After I graduated in 1999, I worked in several "mundane" jobs, both in small local companies, like Coaster Computer Services, and larger ones, like PwC Consulting and IBM. In 2002, I started playing Dark Age of Camelot regularly. That is where, by chance, I met fellow Singaporean Alvin Yap. Together with a few other key members, we took over Clan IronClaw, a multinational mish mash of people, and made it thrive.

Now Alvin, having had previous experience in another game studio, decided to set up his own. I watched with interest as he went through the initial trials of a game developer. A year later, on April Fool''s Day, I left the cushy IBM job and joined his company, Nexgen Studio, working for far-less-than-minimum wage in return for a little company equity, and a bundle of happiness and satisfaction.

Life in a small company on the raggedy edge of a young industry is exciting to say the least. I went through many types of jobs, from PR to production, to programming, to project management, to buying toilet paper... Yup, it was a very full experience. We pulled off a large flurry of projects during that time, both for the mobile and PC platform. All this while, we were meeting VCs and potential angels, hoping and praying one of them would spare us a million dollars or two.

2005 - e-Goh, Singapore

After a bit more than a year in Nexgen, I finally stepped out of the company to pursue my own path as a freelance developer. While I still maintain very close ties with Nexgen, and do a fair number of projects for them, I get to expose myself to other development setups. Living is learning, so they say.

I also teach Game Development at both Nanyang Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic. I also have a different project to work on every day (I alternate). In a couple of years, I might go full steam into business, but I am happy where I am... for now.