colin.cymru

It was a time long ago. Before mobile phones and satellite television. Before daytime TV and phising attacks. Before celebrity makeover golf-opera competition phone ins. Before social networking viral antidotes. Before pretty much everything you care about today, in fact. A winter’s afternoon in south Wales, a Space Invaders clone played on a Texas Instruments games console in a friend’s house. “Like a go, Col?” my friend asked. I picked up the joystick, moved it. A graphic moved on screen. Something inside my head shifted forever. I moved the joystick again, the graphic moved the other way. There was a rough explosion sound and I lost a life. That didn’t matter. Something very small had moved. My world had changed, in an instant. I realised that cartoons on a screen could be controlled by a player. But more than that, I saw that a game, a story, a comic, a song, could be changed by the person experiencing it. I knew what I had to do. Next scheduled post: Tuesday 13th

I always had a problem when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up;  I never could find an answer. I would have said astronaut, but I knew that the food was awful I eventually started saying ‘architect’ which led to a university course and a good grounding in many design skills, but my heart was never really in it. What I didn’t know then, and I didn’t realise until recently, was that the very thing I wanted to do to make a living didn’t even exist at the time. It might not even exist now. Next scheduled post: Fri 9 March.