I consider myself a very dedicated gamer, I have been ever since I can remember, and I mean that in a literal sense. A majority of my earliest memories I can recall includes myself looking looking out for an infant Mario in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, and the moment I received a SNES on one of my very young birthdays.

But why do I proclaim myself a "hardcore" gamer, what may sound like a silly or grandiloquent expression to many, means so much more to someone like myself. To be painfully blunt, my childhood sucked, I mean it sucked. Not like I'm looking for pity here, many kids I'm sure had it worse than me but I was low down there, right near the bottom.

Of all my memories that don't include playing a Nintendo or a Playstation, nearly all of the others feature my parents yelling at each other, and my dad pawning my stuff for cigarettes, mix that in with jumping around with my parents from loanshark to loanshark in order to pay other loan's off you might understand why gaming was all I ever had as a kid, and a prime reason why I'm so good at games and the learning process in general. I literally immersed myself in games to escape reality, constantly getting better and more skilled to occupy myself and divert my attention from how my life sucked.

But at the time I didn't realize that's why I was playing games, I used them as my security blanket, whether times were bad or good, games were there for me. No matter how many times I cleared the original arcade mode in SoulCalibur, I kept on going, trying to improve, be a little better each time, and that never changed regardless of which game I played.

Transitioning now from the days of N64 and Playstation, I discovered Xbox by grade four, and with Xbox came Halo, at the time there were no fanboys yelling, "HALOOOOO!!" and jumping around like it was the best thing they've ever experienced, because to be honest, the original Halo rocked much harder than any Halo title to rear its ugly head henceforth. Now, at this time my life didn't suck so hard, I had Halo, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Sonic Adventure2. My parents didn't argue so much, and usually decided to pay the bills on time. And I started to get involved with the news in the gaming industry, reading various gaming magazines, which at the time EGM comes most prominently to mind.

As time moved on I was introduced to a game we all know as Timesplitters, the single player mode sucked, flat out in my opinion. But at that time I realized how much I loved creating maps in the mapmaker mode, and every game since that which possesses a similar mode, and by now console games with mapmakers just don't do it for me, thus I got into PC game modding from which I've learned a great deal about how games are pieced together, and personally I have gained a monumental respect for all dev teams, indifferent as to how good a game they might produce, it's really not a walk in the park putting any game together, and I think not many people realize that.

Also, it was around this time that I had a revelation, a resolve that to this day remains unbroken, it is quite simply an inescapable truth. I will find work in the gaming industry, or at least try until my dying breath, I have too many ideas and concepts to have them remain unheard.

Now, as you might have guessed as time marched forth a few more years, when I was 14 I discovered Xbox Live, and my true competitive spirit broke loose, I loved pwning noobs, almost too much, times were good, I lived, I pwned, repeat. until 10th grade.

In tenth grade, things changed permanently, if not tragically.