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Originally Posted by QuikSand
To this day, I still think that the economist in me was born at the NFL pencil machine in front of Mr. Meade's office at Woodlands Elementary School.
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Isn't it weird looking back to things that seemed small at the time, but they ended up basically shaping a really big part of your life?
The historian in me was born when I rented this game from the local video store called Ghengis Khan of the NES. Because of that simple, nearly random event, I am a history buff, use a mongol general's name as my handle, and am generally fascinated with all of the "barbarians" in history.
The role-playing fanatic also started the same way. In the local video store, just browsing on a Friday after school. Looking for something to rent for the weekend, I saw this game I never heard of before called Final Fantasy. I didn't breathe fresh air again until Monday morning.
With programming and test sims in general, my parents bought a computer for my dad's business. On it was this thing called QBASIC (I had previously tought myself the version of BASIC on the C64, but that was at the time a fad, since it had been years since my C64 even worked that my parents got this computer). I thought it would be rather neat to make little programs to help move my games along. It took me a long time to do games in some sports, so having programs do it in seconds rather than minutes would be really cool.
I know a lot of people start programming because they simply get a computer, but for me the idea of doing the games was really the motivation for me to learn it. Plus that I had previously leaned the version of BASIC on the C64 because one day I was flipping through the c64 manual and started reading about it. The reason I started all of these systems goes back to summer vacation one year. I had a deck of cards, preseason football had just started, and I was bored. So I took a card at a time, and used it for the score for one period. So I would turn over a 4 and that would be team's 1 score for the first period. Next would be a 9, and that's team's 2 score for the 1st period. And I would do that for 4 quarters. And that was what started me creating systems.
So if you think about it, the biggest parts of my life (history, role-playing games (and with that sci-fi and fantasy, and with that the desire to write my own sci-fi and fantasy), and most importantly programming) was all started because as a kid I flipped through a book, randomly picked 2 games to rent, and was bored one day on summer vacation with a deck of cards.
Of course, a lot of that probably would have happened anyway considering other events (especially the programming), but it's still kind of cool to speculate what things would have been like if I didn't have that deck of cards, or if that game had already been rented by the time I got there, or if that C64 manual hadn't been sitting there or if I wasn't curious to see what was in there.