I’ve been making games for a while and what got me into games as a kid was a visit to the Lismore Show. I grew up in rural NSW and a trip to the Lismore Show was a big event – it was basically lots of cows and horses and ferris wheels. A number of tents were set up to show off different things and in one of the tents was a computer exhibition. In the exhibition they had a PET computer running a game called “Colossal Cave”, which was written by Crowther and Woods.

I went up to it and I typed on it. It responded while I was typing. And there’s a sequence clearly in my head: there was a room with a dwarf, and there was a pot of gold, and he threw an axe at me. And I picked the axe up and I held the axe, then I said “throw axe”, and it said “you threw the axe at the dwarf and he disappeared in a puff of greasy smoke.” That’s the way I remember it as a child. And it was like, my god, this is amazing. It was completely interactive, and from that moment on I thought this is something I want to do. So at that time — I was a child of the 70s — to me this was a way to tell stories that was a very personal way of doing it. And within my realm, not Hollywood’s. So that was very exciting.

I pestered my parents to get the VZ200, a Dick Smith computer, which was made by a Hong Kong company, VTech, and rebadged. It was amazing, it had 4 KB of RAM and built in BASIC. I still have this at home. I got that for Christmas and that was when I started to learn to program BASIC. My first game was called “Attack of the Invisible Werewolf”, which had a little pixel on the screen and after a few seconds, the werewolf would get you and you’d die. It was my first interactive attempt at games.

Then after that in the 80s, Microbee — an Australian made computer, made in Gosford — were rolling out computers to schools. So we upgraded and got a Microbee computer. And this is where I began to program seriously. During high school in the 1980s – 1984, 85 – arcades were huge everywhere. Kyogle, my little country town of 3,500 people had an arcade. There was a game in it called “Pengo” where you push blocks around and I loved playing this game. I think it might have been one of the first match 3 games, where you had to match 3 blocks and they disappeared, which was pretty cool way back in the 80s. And so I went home and I wanted to play it, cos it cost 20 cents a go. And so I got the Microbee and I programmed my own version of that. I called it “Chilly Willy”. Being in high school and not understanding about copyright or anything like that, I broke 2 lots of copyright – I took the copyright of Pengo, and I took Walter Lantz’s beloved little penguin character. On a lark, I sent it off down to Gosford, where Applied Technology and Honeysoft made these computers and games, and they wrote me a letter back saying “Great game, came we publish it?” And I said, “Great, yeah”. So I actually officially was published in high school. I’ve got a cassette tape which I’ve still got, and that was it. It was released. You could only buy it in really small hobby stores or computer stores. The nearest one to me was in Lismore, a little shop called Compu-K. But they sent me two copies, which was very nice of them.