It’s time. It’s finally time.

This has been a long time coming.

I was 3 years old the first time I picked up a joystick. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but something clicked in my little brain. A year later I got my own Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Mario Bros sealed my fate. I was hooked. Not just on playing games… on understanding them. Even as a tiny kid I was fascinated by the invisible machinery behind it all. How did they make Mario jump like that? Why did Mega Man move at exactly that speed? I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet, but I was already thinking about game design.

Nintendo was everywhere in the late 80s. They’d run segments on the evening news showing their offices — cubicles, paper everywhere, computers. They never really talked about what those computers did. In the 80s, computers were alien to most people. But not to me. I WANTED ONE. I wanted one so bad it hurt.

My mom got me a kid’s toy with a keyboard. It was basically a Speak & Spell in disguise. Not a real computer, not even close. But I’d sit there pretending to type, mimicking the hackers I’d seen in movies. I was insufferable. I was also a young child, so I think I get a pass.

Anders leveled up and got his first real computer.

Christmas, age 11. A Packard Bell running Windows 95. I turned that operating system inside out. I was obsessed with understanding how it worked — and I broke it constantly. Reinstalled Windows more times than I can count. (It took forever to install on Windows 95. lol) My parents were less thrilled about this than I was.

We got into the internet pretty early. BBS through a telnet prompt at first, then Prodigy Internet and Netscape. The whole web opened up to me. My parents didn’t put any blocks on anything, which was probably not ideal parenting but was incredible for my education. As part of our Prodigy package, they gave away free server space.

Anders leveled up and learned FTP.

Anders leveled up and learned HTML.

My websites were exactly what you’d expect from a 12-year-old boy in the mid-90s. Animated GIFs, bad jokes, early JavaScript, and MIDI files that started playing the moment you loaded the page. Deeply annoying. Genuinely formative. It taught me syntax. It taught me to be productive on a computer. It planted something.

Around the same time I stumbled into the Warez scene. Hackers, coders, pirates. I was a broke kid who needed software, and these people had everything. I learned cracking. I learned how hardware and operating systems actually worked at a low level. My black hat phase taught me more about computers than any classroom ever would. I wrote my first virus at 13… it would eat System32 and crash the machine. I learned to manipulate the BIOS. That poor Packard Bell took a beating.

Chatrooms connected me to people I found far more interesting than anyone at school. IRC, ICQ. I’d pass little trojan programs to people and mess with them… open their CD tray, play an annoying sound, peek at their webcam feed (320×240 over a 28.8k modem, so grainy it was barely worth the effort). I never did anything seriously malicious. I was mostly just a curious, chaotic little gremlin.

Eventually the Warez scene lost its shine. I knew I was a creator. I’d always known. It was time to actually make something.

Anders leveled up and discovered Klik & Play.

I went back to game creation engines. Early RPG Maker. DOS tools. But my real breakthrough was Klik & Play. It was a visual game editor — no code required, just a spreadsheet-style event system to control everything. Microsoft Paint and Klik’s animation editor were open on my PC basically every waking hour. I made platformers. Run and guns. Small stuff, but it was MINE.

Without Klik & Play, I think I might have quit entirely. What it gave me was immediate feedback. No compile errors. No debugging sessions that went nowhere. I could design a level and play it five minutes later. I started to really understand tilemaps, collision detection, physics. It was invaluable.

I used Clickteam software through most of my teens as it evolved through several versions… eventually into Game Factory, which could produce genuinely polished projects. I knew every event system forward and backward. I became a guru on the support forums, answering questions for everyone without them knowing they were talking to a teenager in West Virginia. I made dozens of small games over those years. They’re all gone now… lost to dead websites, failed floppies, and CDs I never thought to keep. I wish I could go back and play them.

Around 15 I got serious. I knew Clickteam could only take me so far. It was time to learn a real coding language. Everything pointed to C++. I studied obsessively. The early internet didn’t have the documentation resources we have today, so I relied on books. Luckily my step-dad went back to school for IT administration and when he finished a class, his textbooks became mine.

I took those books everywhere. To school, to bed. I’d read them instead of paying attention in class. Skip homework to practice syntax. I used them so much the pages started falling out. The librarian would glue them back together for me. I was a psycho. I say that with complete fondness.

Anders leveled up and learned C++. Kind of.

Traditional school never worked for me. I don’t know if it was neurodivergence, ADHD hyperfocus, or just being a weirdo… probably some combination of all three. I went from decent grades to solid F’s on my report card. I got banned from the computer. Grounded. Repeatedly. So I’d memorize my reference books and fill paper notebooks with code by hand while I was locked out, so I could just try it all the moment I got access back. Nothing stopped me.

I figured out how to game the school system just enough to pass without caring. The school wanted to put me in gifted classes… they said I was “brilliant” (ugh) and that normal classes weren’t challenging me. They were probably right. I refused anyway out of pure spite. More work sounded terrible. I remained a menace.

Eventually I dropped out entirely my senior year. Moved to a new area, new school, no familiar faces. I put my foot down. Done. I got my GED and scored high enough that they put me in the newspaper, which felt appropriately ironic. I tried college… hated it. Tried community college… a comp sci instructor lectured me for using a pointer in a C++ project. My code worked. It wasn’t optimized, sure, but it WORKED. I walked.

I tried animation school next, because I’d always been sketching and storyboarding. But animation schools were going all-in on 3D modeling and I wanted to paint cells and flip pages. I couldn’t see where the industry was heading and I was too stubborn to adapt. Another exit.

Years passed. Random jobs. Video games. Anime. Floating.

And then —

Anders leveled up and discovered the indie game scene.

Tools were getting better. Documentation was better. The community was better. And then Cave Story came out and blew my mind completely open. One man. One game. A masterpiece. A full, polished, professional, beautiful game made by a single human being. I screamed about it to anyone who would listen. That was it. It was absolutely time.

I got into the scene. Made prototypes. Collaborated on projects. I was there, actually in it, talking to the people making things happen. Edmund McMillen was in my AOL Messenger. I joked around with Notch before he had any concept of Minecraft. Derek Yu was a friend and mentor. (I told him Spelunky would never sell. I was catastrophically wrong. He’s brilliant and he knows exactly what he’s doing.)

I ended up in a few game credits here and there but never shipped anything commercial myself. The person who influenced me most during this period was Joachim Sandberg… (konjak). He’d hang out with me in the evenings and just show me things. He worked in old, limited engines and expanded them by hand, creating incredible work within constraints that would have stopped most people cold. He showed me that technical perfection wasn’t the point. You didn’t have to follow established workflows. You could express yourself, unapologetically, and that expression was the whole game. I idolized him. I still do.

But I wasn’t ready. I knew it then and I know it now. I needed to stop and figure out who I actually was before I could put anything real into a game.

More years passed. Depression. Anxiety. Life events. Employment. All the things that come for you when you’re trying to build something. I defaulted to doing nothing. Not laziness… something more like a fog. Low self-esteem, self-doubt, confusion about who I was and what I was actually capable of.

And then, slowly, that changed.

I’m 40 now. I found Buddhism and meditation. I found myself. I know who I am today in a way I genuinely never did before. And yes… I feel the weight of time. I feel like I’m starting late. Some days I feel like I’m running out of runway.

But I’ve meditated on it a lot. I’ve sat with it. And I’ve made peace with it. The only thing that actually matters is whether I start.

So I’m starting.

This blog, this social media presence, this whole thing… it’s me gearing up in public. My first commercial game project. I’m ready to show people my actual soul with no mask on. I’m ready for harsh criticism. I’m ready to throw everything out in the open and see what happens.

I wrote this for myself as much as anything. To motivate myself. To remember where I came from and why this has always mattered.

But if you read all of this… thank you. Genuinely. Come with me on this. I’m strong now, and I know that I am.

–Anders