When I was around 8 or 9 years old, my father took one of the computers from his office to our home. He knew I was interested in computers, and he supported me in that by providing me with "something to play with". I'm not sure his boss knew about it, but he soon found out when my father proudly showed him my first little program that did a tiny little tabular calculation.

I very much appreciate this early support, and in fact I remember this little serpent game that came with that computer. It was written in some really old BASIC (that computer did not even run MS-DOS, yet, but some other operating system probably no one really remembers anymore). So, my very first steps in computer programming were reading the code, trying to understand it and tweaking some of the variables, making the serpents' tails longer and shorter, changing the ASCII-character used to "paint" the serpents and the like.

Even though I think I recall the name of that game back then was "Centipede" or something similar, it was actually an early, ASCII-graphics based version of Lightcycle, a game that appeared in TRON. As a very personal sidenote, I'd like to mention that my dad wanted to take me to that movie - but they wouldn't let us in because I wasn't even 10 years old, and the movie was FSK 12 (which means you need to be at least 12 years old to get in). My father and I were both somewhat frustrated that I couldn't watch that movie with him. The story gets somewhat tragical in the knowledge that only a few months later, my father died of a heart-attack, and so he didn't get a chance to see me being so fascinated when I finally got to see that particular movie which sure was one of the early inspirations for me moving into the world of Virtual Reality.

However, even in the short time we had together (10 years), by being supportive the way he was to the talents inside of me that he obviously could see, he opened the door for me to what much later became a career as a freelance software-engineer. And in the end, he did open something inside of me that 22 years later (which is now) is starting to mature into the development of an actual game.

I want to use this opportunity to express my deep gratefulness to my dad for seeing the seeds of some of my talents even in that early age, and supporting me in letting those seeds grow into little young plants that did seem to disappear and re-appear in the following years every now and then.

Even though he never got to see me making music (which he inspired me to, too... he did see and motivate me to play the organ but did not see me compose and produce actual songs which I did a few years after his death... he also missed the two concerts I gave with the band I had when I was around 18), and he didn't have a chance to see what became of my very first steps in programming computer-software and computer-games. Even though he never got to see what became of those talents of mine, it was definitely him who gave me the very first chance to discover them inside of myself. He did listen to me, and that's how he found out - and then he opened up possibilities for me to let those talents grow. I wish more parents were like that!!!

Interestingly (I was just realizing this while I was writing this), I decided to make "Lightcycle" my first actual game to be implemented, which I will be starting with today. I already created a raw form of the "Lightcycles" to be used in the game before, but right after finishing this Blog entry, I will move to implementing the actual game logic. Jashan Chittesh's Unity Multiplayer TRace ON Cycle (long name, I know) will later be integrated into RaMtiGA as a "game in the game"...