Geek life

Since I was very young, I liked computers and techy stuff; this hobby started at the age of 7 when I visited my cousins from Barcelona. I was amazed by the things the Amiga 500 could do and more than anything, I was very jealous of the nearly 1000 videogames that my cousin was able to get for his collection.

During those times, a Commodore 64 and an Atari 2600 arrived at my home with a cartridge containing 32 games (if I remember well). What a wonderful time... I was constantly visiting neighbors to play Super Sprint in Spectrum, or the Monkey Island (in black & white) in the PC 286 of the guy on the 5th floor, or playing Ghost’n'Goblins in the Amstrad 664 with  3” floppies! of my schoolmate. At that time, we were patient with the loading times. We just wanted to play games like Double Dragon on a green screen, even if we had to wait 15 minutes listening to psychophonies from the Amstrad 464 while loading the game from the cassette.

I believe that the beginning of my geek life started exactly the day of my first communion (in March 1989), when my wise grandmother decided to buy the Amstrad 464 with 400 cassette games from my cousin to give to me. During those years, I was also playing with the famous Amstrad PC 1512 from my family in Almería. A really good computer that used 5 1/4'' disks. A few years later, my father bought an Amstrad PCW 8256 with a printer and green screen. I wasn't very convinced because there were very few games available on that computer.

I remember with special love the "Focus" game saloon in Playa San Juan (Alicante), where the 100 pesetas and 25 pesetas coins were wisely changed in favor of the trick with the electric lighter. We used them to generate a spark inside the coins gap to obtain free credits in the arcade machines. I remember authentic classics like the Wonder Boy, Side Arms, Gun Smoke, Legendary Wings, the famous Street Fighter, Hard Driving, Hammerin’ Harry, Vigilante, Kung-Fu Master, Road Fighter, Spy Hunter, Track and Field, Green Beret, Contra, Combat School, Lethal Enforcers, Mortal Kombat, Gaunlet, Enduro Racer, Super Hang-on, Tetris, Out Run, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Heavy Weight Champ, Passing shot, After Burner, Fatal Fury, Metal Slug, Super Sidekicks, Windjammers, Bubble Bobble, Operation Wolf, Rastan, Wardner, Chase HQ, Cabal, Snow Bros,... really good times of videogame obsession.

The SEGA Megadrive with Sonic: the HedgeHog turned me into a proper addict. I recall it cost me around 27.000 pesetas and due to my low income, I wasn't able to buy a Super Nintendo. That's the reason I never played Zelda and other great Nintendo games when I was a kid.

However, even if I was very into games, I never stopped studying, although Dragon Ball, Big Red Racing and the Playstation were constant distractions.

Things I've felt passionate about at some point in my life

Matrix, Pcmania, Super Juegos, PC Actual, Pentium, The Day of the Tentacle, Lego, C++, Dragon Ball, Japón, Fast Tracker 2, Amiga 500, Radiohead, Gatitos, Amstrad CPC 464, Linux, Star Wars, Mozart, AI, Google, Sim City, Playmobil. Demoscene, Joao Gilberto, Tokyo, Bonsai, piano, PcFútbol, Yamaha, Nissan, Croquets, Pascal, Death Note, Firefox, Windows 95, french fries, DirectX, Foo fighters, TaekWonDo, Gurbaksh Chahal, Shibuya, CouchSurfing, Meccano, Wayne Dyer, LOTR, Blade Runner, mapex (drumming), Blogs, PhpMyAdmin, Rails, Nihongo, Asia, Paella, Photography, HDR, Breaking Bad, The Wire, acustic guitar, Mega Drive, Karate, Wwoofing, Muse, Mario Kart, Bokeh, Akira Kurosawa, TED, Hasekura Tsunesaga, Coldplay, Time lapse, onsen, Canon D550, Sakamoto Ryuichi…

Favorite games

Half-Life 1 and 2, Far Cry, ISS Pro Evolution/Winning Eleven, The Dig, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones in the fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Halo, GP500, Need for Speed Underground, Counter-Strike, Medal of Honor, NBA Jam, Fifa 2006, Resident Evil, Lemmings, Sonic, Mario 64, Another World, Flashback, Forza 4.

Did you know that...

• The first RAM module I bought (slot SIMM) was just for 4 MB and cost me 20.000 pesetas! I got it in the summer of 1994 via CentroMAIL (from PCMANIA) and used it to play Bioforge in my 486 SX 33Mhz with CDROM!

• The neighborhood where I grew up was full of kids addicted to video games. We were constantly exchanging games like the DOOM, Rise of the Robots or the wonderful The Dig (one of my favorite graphic adventures ever).

• Near my home, there was a bar (just crossing the street) and as far as I remember, there was always an arcade machine. I could tell many stories about that place. It was so popular that the fights were constant. Some of the videogames from that place were: Captain Commando, Final Fight, Three Wonders, Shinobi and Pang.

• During my childhood, I only saw one time someone finishing Ghost’n'Goblins in the arcade. It's very very difficult!

• In the bar near my elementary school, they had the arcade with the chicken game... I was rubbish on that game.

Thanks for reading all this! :-)