I've been playing video games since the Commodore 64 when I was about 5 years old.
I'm a film maker who started on the Atari and then went onto the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. So I possibly have a different sensibility to people who didn't play games growing up.
My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. I got it as a present from my mom when I was eight years old, and all I wanted to do with that computer was play games.
I absolutely knew that I wanted to play role-playing games when I saw a friend of mine playing 'Bard's Tale 2' on his Commodore 64.
I am absolutely of the videogames generation, starting on the Atari and Commodore 64 and the Amiga.
In a way, digital cameras were like very early personal computers such as the Commodore 64 - clunky and able to do only a few things.
Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King.
I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.
Since when do we even play games?” “Since when don’t we play games? Games of life, games of death. Games of love, of hope, of chance, of despair, and of all the myriad wonders in between.” I rolled my eyes at the newcomer. “Hello, Carter.
Since becoming a BBC breakfast presenter I have been paid four-figure sums for doing hour-long speeches for associations and at awards dinners. That has been an eye-opener. I am surprised by how much people are willing to pay TV celebrities to do that kind of stuff.
Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.
When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.
I think what they've been doing is largely almost in firefighting mode without a good conceptual framework - either at the micro or the macro level. Micro, you would ask: "What kind of financial or banking system do we want?" Macro, you would say: "What are the underlying problems in the structure of our economy?"
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if the acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of the acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way that it might think and feel about itself.