Who I am. I'm just a guy that loves video games and began this romance when I was a small child growing up in the farmlands of Southern Minnesota. My best friend at the time who I thought was the rich kid in town had received a Atari 2600 and My memories of playing pitfall in his parents bedroom was something of wonder. When the Nintendo first came out, there was only one person in the whole town who had one and it belonged to the daughter of the man who owned the Zenith (yes, Zenith) appliance store. They had the system hooked up to the televisions on display so that He could watch her instead of having to rely on daycare. My travels while I would rampant around the town generally led there and now that I look back on it, I was a pretty annoying kid. I would always bother the owner to play the system because growing up my family never had enough money to spend on frivolous things like video games when outside was our mushroom kingdom.

Fast forward to the Christmas of 1986 is when my 4 brothers and I got the NES Entertainment system. We would of course physically fight each other to play the thing. I also remember waking up at 4:00AM everyday before school to play it until I had to get on the bus. I also remember getting in trouble for causing such a commotion and waking up my father who had grown thoroughly annoyed at the boing boing sound that Mario would make as he jumped.

Over the Year, I would continue this pattern until I would accomplish the one great feat that I was working on for almost a year. Halloween of 1987 was the first year that I figured that I was to old to go out trick or treating in the neighborhood. I stayed home playing SMB that evening with only one goal. That was to do that cheat-thing in world 3-1 where at the end you had the opportunity to be able to time a jump on a red koopa in rapid succession to get an infinite number of lives. That night I earned a "Crown" number of lives and I was officially finished with that Mario chapter of my life.

Of course, over the years, I have played many more video games since then and have a blast with all of them. Not to go into to much about all the games that I have played but I just have a passion for them in all forms.

I have done my time as an EB Games store manager where I walked because they couldn't afford to pay my asking price of 40 grand a year. With a degree mind you. After that section I moved out to Norther California to make headway into this massive world that is Video Game Journalism. I contribute regularly to http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-san-francisco/john-speerbrecker and Now, I will officially be working with http://www.destructoid.com as a local contributor. After many years of soul searching and really going after what I love, I am really excited and amazed at what the future will hold.

Pieces.