Gaming with my sister Cheryl (1978-2002)

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I’ll never forget the night my dad called to say that my younger sister had passed away. I had just returned to Los Angeles from a business trip to Outrage Games in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Actually, I don’t remember most of the details of that night, as I was simply in a state of shock, sadness, and helplessness.

I remember telling myself that I had to stay strong for my family’s sake, especially my mom, who had just the year prior lost her mother. So much of the days and weeks that followed were a blur, and before I knew it, I was back at work, doing my best to, as they say, pick up the pieces and move on. It’s always easier to give this advice than to take it.

The year prior in 2001, Cheryl had gotten really sick with encephalitis, and was in a coma for about two days. When she came out of it, it seemed like everything was OK, but then she began suffering from major seizures several times a day. Although she would eventually recover to the point where she was able to go home, she would continue to struggle with occasional seizures and other day-to-day limitations.

It changed her personality as well, where she would lose her patience and get frustrated with things almost instantly, and after experiencing it several times, I would make sure to approach things with her more carefully from then on. After hosting a holiday party for her friends in December of 2002, she passed away in her sleep that night. It was concluded that she suffered another seizure.

A lot of people knew my sister Cheryl, her love for the Los Angeles Clippers, the Denver Broncos, teaching, and anything that had to do with monkeys, but few of them likely knew that she also loved videogames, or that she was better than me at many of them. Maybe it was because we were only 4 years apart, and games were such an integral part of my own life, that it became a shared hobby — and source of competition — between us.

20140818_digdugAs early as 1983, when our family was living in Spring, Texas, and Cheryl was still in kindergarten, I remember the Atari 2600 being central to our home life when the weather didn’t permit us to be outside riding our bikes, swimming, and hurting ourselves in every which way as kids do.

Even back then, she was good at games like Dig Dug and Ms. Pac-Man, which when you think about it, require you to pay attention to multiple enemies on the screen and plan out a good strategy to beat them. That’s pretty advanced stuff for a 5-year-old that everyone expected to be playing with Barbie dolls. For the record, she never liked ’em.

20140818_mastertypeWhile we were still living in Texas, my dad bought the family an Apple IIe. He loved the business applications such as the precursor to today’s ubiquitous Microsoft Excel: VisiCalc, but my sister and I were all about the games.

Although she was getting cool software like Spinnaker’s Kindercomp — which is still very good for its age and target audience — she was always more interested in what I was playing. MasterType was one of those educational titles wrapped up in a game, and it taught both of us to type well at an early age. In fact, it wasn’t long before she was a better typist than me!

20140818_safarihuntAs the 8-bit console era came around and we got our Sega Master System, her favorite games on it were the Light Phaser gun games, such as Safari Hunt, Marksman Shooting, and Trap Shooting.

At one point she was so good at Trap Shooting that she would essentially “break” the game. As you would progress through it, the hit box on the traps would get smaller and smaller. She would get so far into it that the hit boxes would cease to even exist. A bug on Sega’s part, perhaps, but she would always be proud of her achievement.

20140818_sf2tThe 16-bit era is when everything came to a head. All those years of playing on the Atari, Apple, and Master System had honed her hand-eye coordination to needle-like levels of sharpness. No other game proved just how terrible at fighting games I was — or rather, how good she was — than Street Fighter II Turbo for the Super Nintendo.

I thought I was pretty good at it. I mean, I had lots of practice from arcades and the regular Street Fighter II SNES cartridge, but Cheryl was a natural. In fact, she was so adept at it that she would regularly perform a “round-robin” in V.S. Battle mode where she would fight me using each character once — beat me with all of them — and after doing so, look at me, say “You suck!”, drop the controller on the floor, and leave the room. Oh, how that made my blood boil!

20140818_bamIt didn’t stop there. In college, I bought Taito’s Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble), which I also thought I was good at after having played a ton of the Neo Geo game in arcades.

Oh, no. Once again, after playing it for just a few short days, Cheryl was like Bobby Fischer with it, hitting impossible shots and rarely making mistakes bouncing the bubbles off the side walls. I would go on to hear her trademark “You suck!” more than I’d care to admit. It was a lot.

The thing is, even though she kicked my butt six ways from Sunday competitively, those remain some of my best memories. Her taunting would evolve from simple verbal jabs to her strategically eating dried squid before a game and then burping it in my face at the most opportune times to mess me up. It worked. A little too well. I can still smell it!

20140818_sbbI think her absolute favorite game, though, was Super Buster Bros. on the Super Nintendo. She even bought her own system so that she could play it after she moved to San Diego for college. Her favorite mode was Panic, where you’d just work your way through progressively more difficult waves of bouncing bubbles and hexagons, and watching her play this was amazing.

Again, all those years of gaming made it easy for her to focus on so many on-screen objects at once. It was actually pretty inspiring to watch, so this also went on to became a favorite game of mine, and I’ll still dust it off from time to time to see how far I can get. Never as far as her, of course.

Unsurprisingly, she was really good at another game that had spherical objects in it as well: pinball.

20140818_pfPorted from the Amiga to the PC in the early ’90s, Digital Illusions’ Pinball Fantasies was one of the best arcade pinball simulators at the time, and the both of us played it nonstop.

Cheryl got really good at saving the ball via the game’s nudge feature. With good timing, you can bounce it out of the bottom at the last second and bring it back into play. It wasn’t very realistic, but it was always impressive when you could get it to happen regularly.

She was also the first one to get over a billion points on the Billion Dollar Gameshow table, and to this day, I haven’t been able to catch and beat her score. I still have her MS-DOS high score files from this game on 3.5″ floppy disk in storage.

The 32-bit generation arrived in the mid-’90s, and by then I was seeing less and less of my sister as not only was I beginning my full-time career at Interplay, but she was nearing the end of high school, working part-time at the Sanrio store, and was highly involved in sports, clubs, and other activities.

20140818_ridgeracerHowever, we would always find time to get in a game or two here and there, and her favorite on the PlayStation was Namco’s Ridge Racer. While we were at the point in our lives where we weren’t all that competitive anymore, it was still a lot of fun to take turns and play.

Her favorite music track in the game was “Rotterdam Nation”, and she would bob her head to it with a serious look on her face as she gracefully drifted around all of the game’s sweeping curves and hairpins.

She would yell at the A.I. cars if they bumped into her, affectionately referring to the Dig Dug car as the “multicolored piece of crap” or the pink 31 flavors-like Mappy car as the “Bastard Robbins”. Seems silly now, but we used to crack each other up with our cheesy jokes.

And that’s what life is all about, right? Making memories that can bring a smile to your face and a tear to your eye, no matter how insignificant they might seem to everyone else. That’s why I get very defensive when people dismissively talk about this hobby with me, saying things like, “Videogames are for kids,” or “You play too many games,” etc.

What these folks don’t understand is that games have the power to not only challenge us on an individual level, but they can bring people together, creating lifelong memories that shape who we are.

Perhaps I haven’t said this until now, but a big reason why I still play games is that they remind me of exactly what I wrote about above: my sister and all the great experiences we shared with controllers in our hands, sitting in front of a TV, yelling, laughing, and bonding.

Happy Birthday, Cheryl. I miss you, and sorry about bringing up the dried squid burps. I couldn’t help myself!

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My start in the videogame industry

Note: This is a revised version of an email I had sent to my Quality Assurance (QA) team while working at THQ in 2010. I was a Sr. Manager in Phoenix, Arizona at the time, and these were meant to be a regular, ongoing series about my experiences in the industry. Although I only managed to get a few of these written, I’m happy to be bringing them back to life here at GHG.

20140423_pacmanA question I receive on a regular basis is, “How did you get your start?”

This can be a tough question to answer, especially when people ask it in the context of why I managed QA at a publisher instead of working as a Producer or at a game development studio. As with most things in life, it was not planned this way, and there were many decisions — both good and bad — that factored into and affected my career path. Before I actually began working in this industry — and even several years into it — I really did believe my future was in game design.

But first, I have to rewind to the beginning, circa 1980, when my love of all things videogames started. I was fascinated by arcade games, and clearly remember “playing” Asteroids for the first time. I utterly failed at it, since my still-developing brain had trouble understanding the concept of button controls instead of a joystick. I’m sure it would still intimidate me if I ran into it today!

20140423_dkIt didn’t matter, though. Games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had already sealed the deal, and it was in 1982 when my dad bought the family an Atari 2600, a console whose success Atari was never able to duplicate. It’s popular to hate on 2600 games like Pac-Man and E.T., but I liked them. Did I know they were poorly made games? Sure, but by the same token, playing the bad games made me appreciate the great ones like Yar’s Revenge, Space Invaders, and River Raid.

Several years later in 1984, our first computer arrived: The Apple //e. I remember my dad saying it would be a good educational and home business tool, but let’s face it, it was all about the games and programming in BASIC and assembly! A very fond memory of the time was the plethora of magazines and books chock-full of programs, and I remember transcribing nearly all of them and saving them on disk. They were also ridden with syntax and logic errors, so this taught me how to troubleshoot code before the days of more advanced debuggers and compilers. While it annoyed me when programs wouldn’t work correctly the first time, I was later thankful since they helped me improve at general problem solving and how to improvise and create my own code.

20140423_archonI loved game design at an early age as well. Around 1986, my best friend and I worked on a prototype design for Archon III in our spare time. We were huge fans of Archon and Archon II: Adept, and I’m not sure what our naive minds were thinking, but we actually thought that if we submitted this to Electronic Arts (EA), we would somehow get jobs working for them creating this game ourselves!

Imagine our disappointment after having spent months working on graphics, gameplay, stories, and maps, and not even receive so much as a thank you letter? We were crushed, but it taught us to keep idealistic wishes in check with reality.

In the end, it was still a fun experience, and coincidentally, we used one of EA’s own programs at the time, Adventure Construction Set, to create the sprites and map layouts for our design. It was extremely time-consuming, but this gave us a deep appreciation for the work artists and animators put into all the games we loved to play.

20140423_btBesides the Archon series, Interplay’s The Bard’s Tale was a huge influence on me, and I still remember the day I loaded it up for the very first time. I had borrowed it from my neighbor across the street after having played some street football after school, and even on the Apple //e, with its 280×192 resolution and 7 colors, I was blown away. The graphics and animation had a unique style I had never seen before, and the battles were fast, fun, and descriptive. A desire to work on games like this for a living began to materialize in my head once again.

I remember reading an article in an old magazine (I believe it was K Power), which described the rubber band gun battles that Richard Garriott, better known as Lord British, would have with his team while working on the Ultima games. It sounded like such a fun place to work, and it would turn out that this fun spirit in the industry was actually quite accurate.

Fast-forward to 1995. My love for all things Interplay was still going strong, and that summer, my friend who worked there asked if I wanted “a cool job playing games”, wording that I know makes QA professionals twitch uncontrollably.

Unsurprisingly, though, I took the job.

I spent my first day there testing a final version of Castles II for the Mac. I had no idea what I was doing, there was no such thing as training, I was staring at printouts full of abbreviations like NF, PF, and NB, and I was surrounded by strangers. I almost quit after my first day.

I always thought back on that when I saw new Testers quit before they were through their first week. I wondered if they did so because they felt the same way I did?

Anyway, I stuck with it, and after a few weeks, everything clicked. However, I quickly learned the difference between what I played and liked as a consumer and what I was required to test. Just because I really liked Descent and Virtual Pool didn’t mean that I’d be assigned to games like that all the time. Early on, I tested a CD-ROM musical documentary and a sluggish Myst-like adventure game, both of which sat on buggy middleware. Needless to say, this didn’t exactly align with my plans to work on the next Bard’s Tale!

So that’s what initially got my foot in the door: lots of passion for gaming, a little bit of luck in terms of timing, and an open mind.

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