No, I swear I’ll keep this brief. ::shifty eyes::
I’ve been gaming my whole life, or at least a large chunk of it. Having a mother that was a Star Trek and Tolkien fan and who took me to Star Wars opening day (and for weeks thereafter) meant that I could happily explore the “geek” side of life all I wanted. When I asked for “a game thing called Dungeons and Dragons”, she got it for me. I spent insane amounts of time reading fantasy and scifi novels, most of them hers. (And I was always amused hearing her explain to other adults “Yes, my 7 year old daughter is quite capable of understanding the Asimov book she is reading. Now quit bothering her.”) Then there was the added interests in art, which meant I got a ton of paper, pencils, watercolors, etc. for gifts, which was fine by me. My stepmother introduced me to computers via a cradle modem dialed into the Cray supercomputers that she worked on so I could play endless games of Othello while visiting her and my father. Needless to say, at some point all of these interests were going to collide.
Once home computers became all the rage, Mom went off and got one. I learned to program BASIC and did horrible, horrible things in the name of “coding” (ever had to draw art by plotting and then programming vector lines? ewwwww). At the same time, consoles were taking off, then crashing, then taking off again, and I played over at friends’ houses. Finally Zelda came around and I cheered.
Over the years, I watched the game industry’s progress and growth, while going to two colleges and finally ending up a graphic designer with a degree in Computer Art. I got my own Mac for home/work, lost my mind over Myst, and started collecting what RPG games I could find for the Mac. I finally got my hands on a Playstation, lost a ton of time to playing games on it, always tending towards RPGs. Blizzard made one of the new non-RPG games that I played, a little game called “Warcraft.” Then they made Diablo and I lost of couple of months playing it. Oops.
Eventually Sony decided to try Everquest out on the PS2, I got a Beta 1 invite, went back for Betas 2 and 3, helped write a guide for all us totally lost beta testers then went on to run two guilds when it went live. When beta invites went out for Final Fantasy 11 on the PS2, I was lucky enough to get into it, went to the live game when it came out, then The Boyfriend said “So Blizzard’s coming out with ‘World of Warcraft’ on Tuesday…”
That’s when I lost the next few years of my life. Whoops. 
So now you know a little more about me. Lifelong gamer, computer artist/designer (although that’s changing soon), avid reader, and happy NE Hunter. 
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