I've lurked here for a bit, and felt like posting something. Thus, the ancient ritual of the introduction must be observed.
My name is Steve. I'm originally from New York, and currently reside near Seattle. I grew up playing mostly NES. I was a big fan of Little Nemo because I loved the art style, music, and the idea that feeding candy to animals made them fall asleep so you could use their abilities.
The golden era of gaming for me was the days of Saturn and N64. My friends and I used to sit around all day playing Virtua Fighter 2, Fighting Vipers and Fighters Megamix.
Space Station Silicon Valley will always be one of my all time favs.
Apparently, I really like games where you subdue enemies in order to steal their abilities. Come to think of it, Kirby on the NES (and Gameboy!) was pretty sweet too.
When Diablo came out, I was instantly addicted and pulled into PC gaming. I pulled many an all-nighter playing on Battle.net before the rampant hacking ruined the experience.
Then one day in the game store I saw a box that reminded me an awful lot of Diablo:
Knowing nothing about the game, I bought it on a whim. That's how I got accidentally introduced to my favorite PC game of all time. I still play Dungeon Keeper 2 sometimes to this day, and even managed to get my fiance addicted to it even though she is a pure console gamer.
The last game which I'll mention is another one which I picked up quite a few years ago but still play to this day: Moonbase Commander.
It is the most perfect blend of multiplayer awesome I have ever experienced. Nobody I talk to ever knows what it is, but once we sit down and play a game they are hooked.
Newer games are not as much fun to reminisce about, so I'll just skip those. This has been going too long anyway
There are a few games which I've actually made myself over the past few years. The first one worth mentioning is
Paper Chase 2, which is a brutal stick figure fighter/platformer.
It has some bugs and other issues due to not getting fully polished, but it makes me happy for two main reasons:
1. You can dispatch your enemies by upper-cutting their heads clean off of their bodies. You are rewarded for performing this task
not only with watching their body slump to the ground clutching at where its head used to be, but also with the ability to use the head as a projectile weapon. This always makes me smile.
2. You can snap off enemy legs by grabbing their foot and stomping down, forcing it to snap off at the thigh. After this, your now one-legged enemy will attempt to hop away as you beat him to death with his own leg. This also makes me smile.
I'm not really a violent person, so I have no idea where this game came from. Also, according to my bandwidth logs, this game is insanely popular in Poland. I'm not sure what this says about Polish people in general.
The next game I worked on was
Toblo. It is a CTF game in which the world is made up entirely of blocks. As a player, your only source of ammunition is the blocks which make up the world, so you literally tear the place apart trying to get the flags. There are also super-sweet explosions.
After Toblo I worked on Drawn To Life for the DS. The idea behind DtL is that you can draw your own hero, as well as many of the things you interact with in the game. This was an extremely fun project to work on, mostly because I could draw inappropriate things while testing my code.
I have also worked on another DS game which is currently still unannounced, but hopefully will be revealed soon. I have actually left the game industry for the time being to sell out and make financial software. The real benefit of this is that I have a chance to get back to working on my own independent projects. I'm currently working on a flash game with a couple of other people which will hopefully be in a playable state some time in the near future.
I've met some of you at GDC and elsewhere, and it will be nice to hopefully get to know some more of you in the future. Wow, that was waaaaay longer than I originally intended it to be. Reminiscing about old games is a dangerous time sink.
I'll leave you with one picture of me looking like a dork at IGF:
and another of the headshot I used in the E for All programs last year:
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