I've owned several gaming consoles through the years. Although my little brother had an Atari 5200 which our parents had purchased for him, the first console I actually owned myself was the Super Nintendo. I later bought a Panasonic 3DO and then the original Sony Playstation. Today my children continue the legacy by playing video games on the Nintendo 64, GameCube, GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS and Playstation 2 systems.

  Thanks to the work done by emulation developers like FreeDO and PCSX I can still play many of the games that I own for the 3DO and Playstation systems on my computer, though I have to admit there are very few I bother with. These days most of my gaming is done on a computer, because I like the customization possible with computer games and that has made them more attractive to me than their console counterparts.

  My first computer was a Commodore 128 which I had bought second hand from a friend of mine back in the latter part of the nineteen-eighties. I wasn't new to computers then, as my father worked for IBM, so he had owned some of the early IBM personal computers. Including one of the first portable computers, which compared to today's laptops was anything but, as the thing was the size of a large suitcase. The game I liked playing the most on my Commodore 128 was called Bard's Tale and I spent many, many hours playing it. In fact, I bought the most recent installment of Bard's Tale for my PC and I enjoyed playing it thoroughly as well.

  The first internet capable computer I owned was a PowerComputing 133 MHz tower, which was essentially a Macintosh manufactured under license from Apple. Soon thereafter I got hooked on Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords and later its successor Myth II: Soulblighter. I was just as taken by the community that grew up around the games and I became involved early on with several aspects of that community. I initially contributed to a website which was devoted to the Myth series and through this I was exposed to the people who were editing their own original additions to the game. This eventually led to my becoming interested in the editing process as well and the result was that I ended up developing a slew of multiplayer levels and modifications for the game myself. These Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter multiplayer levels and modifications of mine can be found here.

  My current computer is a PowerMac G5, but I also have a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 PC which is what I primarily use for playing video games. Lately my interest in video games has began to wane. I don't play, or edit, the Myth games anymore and haven't done so for quite some time now. There are still a couple of games I like to play occasionally, but none that I play very often. The game that I currently play the most is UT2004, but I primarily use it as an excuse to keep up with a very good friend of mine. I have also done some editing on UT, though only to create player skins of myself and my friend. You can view my UT2004 player skin portrait here and download the actual skin for the game here. Another game that I enjoy goofing around on from time to time is Flatout. I have many other games as well, titles such as Battlefield 1942, Doom III, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Myth III, Need for Speed Underground 2, Tribes 2 and Warcraft III, but I simply don't spend very much time playing them. Perhaps someday this will all change and I'll start playing video games frequently again, who knows?