I believe games to be the ultimate future of media. You can implement so many things into games that benefit yourself. Beautiful storytelling, strategic and tactical things against other people, pure enjoyment of immersing yourself. So many different things that games touch and affect even in just our normal day-to-day life, affecting how we think about things or simply just getting away from the real world to somewhere we want to be. Games mean something different to each person but they are amazing.

Every year I watch (once was called E3) now called Summer Games Fest and have since I was a kid. The latest big announcements of the next games to be released, whether that’s a new IP altogether to become another massive cultural impact or game changer like GTA V was, another big licensed game like Star Wars or whether the next sequel in your favourite game series. There are so many, many great games still being made and new ways to play games, VR headsets were a big technical upgrade from a flatscreen TV, or something as simple as DirectX 12, better graphics cards, new engines that push into bigger and better games. Or even just getting excited about the latest indie games coming out, some that create massive new social spaces and communities like Helldivers 2.

Summer Games Fest is my Christmas every year, because we get to see the next things to come out and get hyped about before meeting those expectations or completely destroying them. These reasons and many more is why I love games, and the simple reason of how much fun they are too.

My journey with games have been quite a long one and I’ve been gaming for a very long time, all the way back on Windows XP. One of the very first games I remember playing from a very small child was a game collection on a disc called “Big Bonus CD”. You can look it up but there isn’t much about it anymore, it had a lot of old Disney games on, I believe from 1996. Although it was slightly terrifying as a kid.

From there I started to play games on my dad’s PC and original Xbox, the first ever console I played on. I remember being terrified of some of those PC games, one of them being Dead Rising. I wasn’t exactly encouraged to play those games however. I was pretty easily scared as a child of zombie games. However that’s around the time I finally got to experience Halo: Combat Evolved on the PC, which was amazing, the first game I played on PC that I actually would go back and play.

On the original Xbox was another game I’d remember forever called TimeSplitters 2, a GoldenEye kind of game where you jumped through portals going to different time periods to try to stop the evil aliens from changing history and get the time crystals… or something like that. I could go on with other games I played like one called Kung Fu Chaos.

Finally, when I was probably very young still I got my first ever console and still my favourite ever console, the PlayStation 2. This console was and I believe still is the best ever console made. The games on it were amazing, I must have played loads of different games on here growing up and it lasted a long time with me too. I remember sitting in my small room, I had a CRT TV with a small desk and chair and enjoying so many different games, whether that be SpongeBob games. Unfortunately, since I was still very young, I only really played the games that my dad ended up getting me. I never played any Square Enix games, any Eastern games really and usually pretty kid friendly ones. Except one called “Metal Arms: Glitch” that was good.

Then I got the Xbox 360 probably when I was around 11 or 12. This was the console I had for the longest time I can remember. That was when I would play a lot of games with my friends like Halo, Battlefield and sometimes FIFA. Also a lot of Call of Duty, yeah I was one of those kids. Getting older I started playing on the Xbox One and still playing Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo a lot. Sometimes the Xbox arcade games too.

Around the last year of school I picked a course to do called “Media Studies” and since I was a very good boy in school I was favoured quite a bit and managed to get into it. The topic for Media Studies was games and I was super excited. It was a lot of magazines and videos and trailers but it was very, very exciting. It was the first lesson I kind of learnt that I can go into games and study them more, maybe even make them. It also happened to get me a B, which was a big shock considering I really struggled with school and it was my highest grade ever, so I applied myself to do game design in college.

I think college was a big eye-opener, I learnt a lot I missed out on. A lot of different games, card games and even anime… no idea that was a thing until college… well I did watch Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon as a kid but no idea they were something called “anime”. In college I learnt about coding, modelling and the Unreal Engine.

There’s something important in this year that I kind of still follow to this day. I love games, all sizes and shapes, they innovate and inspire the way we think. I will get into that another time but I started playing other games and branching out a small bit from my usual games. I think I still mainly played a lot of CoD but also got my first gaming PC so I started to discover PC games again. Unfortunately I don’t remember too much from college haha. Though I did well I moved onto university at 18.

University was a massive game changer for me. I was doing game design, not so good at the written but very good at the practical. I seem to have a liking and understanding with the Unreal Engine. I won’t go into too much with university because I would be here all day but this is when I discovered… other games… mainly. Meeting so many people I discovered games like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and all those games I missed growing up. I still find them now and try to play them but some of them are quite old. I made many games, some I’m proud of, others not.

At this point I was heavily into games now and the upcoming ones. Making them was so much fun and amazing… though life happens. I managed to get a warehouse job and I moved and I started to struggle to keep making games, some of my friends go into companies, a lot of them did. I started to fall out with game companies and my love for them. This is when articles were coming out about them laying people off, corruption and abuse in companies and massively being overworked. I still tried making small projects and games but I wasn’t really excited about them anymore. However my love for games hadn’t and still hasn’t wavered.

Currently, I am working in a tech support officer role and have shifted my career more to that side, being only really good at the Unreal Engine in university made me think maybe I should shift towards tech more and less on games, just so I can simply enjoy them more. I still love playing games, not to say it’s all good but now I am at a good point in life to put some time in and share my love for games and share the latest things I think are exciting, things I strongly dislike and give my own insight into it by writing this blog and I’m looking forward to the future of games.