As a wide-eyed youngster of the age of 9, I had already had a fair bit of experience with video games.

My dad purchased his first PC the year i was born in 1988, as he constantly found himself with time to spare, as at the time he was a draftsman who worked on contract, he bought some games.

The first of which was a adventure game I'm sure you have all heard of, Space Quest III. This was my first experience with a game, at the age of around 4. I tried to play it, but being heavily based in words, it seemed my 4 year old vocabulary, which I'm sure mainly consisted of mummy, daddy and feed me, was simply not up to the task to write such complex phrases as 'place ladder near gap' or 'push hook'. So i often found myself fiddling on paint instead.



The very first game i ever received was called Crystal Caves, it was a 3 part platformer, where the main objective was the get all the crystals. It had a couple of puzzles but nothing too challenging.



And so the years went on, and i continued to dabble in games. So this brings us back to me at the age of 9. In 1997 when I was in year 4 i found two games that would cement my love for gaming.

On some completely unspectacular day in the winter of 1997, I went shopping with my mum. We went into Grace Bros (what Myer used to be called OR a department store, for anyone who has no idea what I'm referring to :D.). Upon reaching the electronics/games section, I set to work looking for something interesting. I found it.



A Sierra game pack, consisting of Lighthouse, Police Quest: Open Season, and the title that really caught my attention, Space Quest VI: The Spinal Frontier. It was EPIC.

Unfortunately I wouldn't get Space Quest working until a year and a half later, the new computer my dad bought was fickle, and took allot of fiddling to get a game to work correctly. I'm not even sure how I eventually got it to work, I just did.

So it was not Space Quest that got me into gaming, it was the combination of one of the aforementioned games Lighthouse and another semi-famous game Broken-Sword: and the shadow of the Templars.

Lighthouse came first, It took my Father and I at least 2-3 months to complete, after many, many sick-days from school and afternoons with my father, sitting in front of the computer screen for hours, trying to figure out how to get the submarine to work properly, or how to acquire a certain part, we finally finished it.



My one regret was that I beat in the afternoon just before my dad got home, but of course I was more than happy to reload from a save point we had made the night before and finish it with him there.

The second game was Broken-Sword, this came only a month after completing Lighthouse (Police Quest was just way too hard back then.). Upon visiting my friends place i found him playing the game, and I was immediately enthralled.



He was stuck on a point in the game, and after 10 or 15 minutes of trying to get my bearings in the game we figured it out. And this began the 'Two heads is better than one' idea. We would share the game for a week at a time, and try to beat the game in parts. Eventually after many weeks of sharing and many phone calls to one another during the week when we were stuck we eventually beat it.

It was a great game, and I still adore the series, The Sleeping Dragon was a bit meh, but The Angel of Death redeemed it.

So these games made me fall in love with gaming, of course many more adventure games ensued. Titles such as Monkey Island, Myst, eventually beating Space Quest and the Police Quest games, S.P.Q.R, and later on the Runaway series.



I still adore Adventure games, and I wish more were made. I'm yet to play Zack and Wiki yet, but thats definitely on my list.

So without my dad i would probably never have gotten involved in games, and dreamt of becoming a games designer. I probably would have ended up as a engineer or something boring (sorry dad :D).

So thank god for my dad and thank god for adventure games!