Start Rocking the Awesome Games

Hi there! First posts being first posts and all I think I'll start with some explanation.

My name's Hank. Or Havoc Jack. Or "that jerk" or "hey ugly" or "you in the fedora" will all suffice. I run a startup game design and publishing company called Awesome Games. Yeah, it's over the top, but it gets the point across. I'm writing this blog to talk about games and game design, partly because they're fun things to talk about, and partly in the hope that you'll be inspired by all this talk to check out one of our games. Hey, if they're as awesome as I think they are they're well worth your time. But who am I to have an opinion?

I'm a gamer born and bred. I've been playing chess with my older brother literally for longer than I can remember. I was three or four when I started, eight at least before I finally beat him. I can still remember exactly how his king was in checkmate, and where we were playing the game. Serves him right... but where was I? Oh yeah.

I've also been metagaming nearly as long. When I was five my family had a TRS80 with a Tetris program on it. I figured out that slamming the pieces down and starting on a higher difficulty both got you more points. When I was in junior high I brought RISK along with the boy scouts winter camping. When I was in high school I mocked people for playing Magic: the Gathering. When I was in college I took up Magic: the Gathering rather excitedly. I do less role playing than I would like, but I've been in a couple campaigns and I've run one.

I'm also an avid videogamer; when I was six I fell asleep playing Super Mario Bros. By the time I was seven I had memorized just about every secret in Mario III. (Still remember them). I started on computer games with Sim City 2000 on a Packard Bell running windows 3.1 in 1994. Played any number of games since then. When I was in high school I got calls from friends asking me how to get through certain portions of Fallout II and I'd answer their questions quoting from memory the exact dialogue options they would need to take. I taught myself to program in basic on my Ti-86 graphing calculator, eventually culminating in a game wherein you played as a Mad Scientist and got to conquer the world. (The game was called "MADNESS", so I could start with a splash screen reading "Welcome to MADNESS!" Fun times.) In general I tend towards RPG style videogames. I'm a real sucker for MMOs.

If you know the Magic psychographics, I'm a Timmy, and a Melvin. I have noticed tendencies from the other profiles too. If you go by the Bartle Test I'm an Explorer then an Achiever. If you've read all the above then I think you'll agree that I'm one hell of a nerd. Maybe not world class yet, but I'm ambitious.

And my company? Awesome games? I'm not going to say much about it, just that we don't need to make sense, we just need to make Awesome Games. That's our slogan, and we take it seriously. If you want to know more, read the blog and you'll learn a thing or two.