Inspirational

by

A word of caution before you read this.. it's written with the aid of rose tinted glasses and a generous dollop of nostalgia.

We all have childhood heroes as we grow up. People who inspire us, people who motivate us. I, like you, have several, but one of mine is this guy:

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Those of you in your 30s with a history of gaming will recognise the name, Andrew Braybrook, if not the unflattering picture. Andrew wrote Uridium for the C64 (along with several other great games). It wasn't just the games themselves though; it was more about the developers diary as serialised in the magazine Zzap64. I can't explain how fantastic this was to me back in *cough* 1987 when it was published and how I ached every month for the next instalment. Reading it was like finding someone who was doing exactly what you would be doing if you could choose anything in the world, and having them describe it in the smallest detail as they did it.

Reading those articles was a pivotal in my becoming a software developer. The likelihood is that I would have ended up there anyway, but reading these sneak previews of what it was like, made it a certainty.

If you have any interest in gaming, development, or how things were when ingenuity was the best way to get performance out of a computer rather than waiting three weeks for CPU clock speeds to double, then I heartily recommend them.

The series was titled Mental Procreation, and is available here:

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html