Hello - I'm happy to be number 97 on this board, more power to its elbow. I'm Andy, I live in Surrey together with my wife, 4-year-old son, bump-to-be, and a large number of items of dusty electronics. I've been in love with games and games hardware since I clapped eyes on a Boot Hill coin-op in an outward-bounds course - I was rubbish at it, beaten by all comers, had to come back late when nobody was around. I remember it towering over me, so I must've been pretty young - probably 12 or so.
Now I content myself with a couple of coin-ops, a bunch of JAMMA boards, a couple of pinballs, and a lot of old computers, consoles, carts (including a certain one of Mr Spencer's), discs, tapes, microdrives and the usual old gubbins. I long for an Atari 810 disk drive and a Neo Geo AES. My son joins me for the odd retro game - he likes Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, the Twilight Zone pin, and he's fascinated with Defender but he doesn't get the controls yet. His favourite thing is Lego Star Wars though (previously Lego Batman, until we 100%-ed it), which we play together... most days
I've spent my professional life either writing about, designing, developing or producing games, and I spend some of my spare time as part of the Bafta video games committee trying to make video games more accepted as an art form and as wholesome entertainment. Any spare time remaining goes into writing my book, about the history of UK computer games development between 1980 and 1987. Finally, last night I interviewed Nolan Bushnell on stage, a hero of mine (maybe many people of a certain age?) and turned out to be a lovely, humble guy... and then I contrived to beat him at a game of VCS Combat in front of a crowd - accidentally, I might add. I'll post up the link to the video when they've edited it. All the best, hope to contribute here often. Sorry for the long post. It's late, and I'm waiting for the programmers to fix a hang before we submit a milestone...
