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May 24, 1999
Introduction
I was born in 1971 in the city of Utrecht in The Netherlands. At the time of writing this, that makes me 27 years old. Utrecht is a very old city that was founded by the Romans in 50BC and is the fourth largest city in The Netherlands after Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. Utrecht was right at the northern-most border of the Roman empire where they were held back by the Fresians. Other than history I have another couple of interests, namely reading (fantasy, horror), playing squash, go-karting and other car racing sports, working, computers and computer games. Since this web site is largely dedicated to gaming, I will talk some more of my interests in that area.
The History Of Computer Games
During my childhood I cannot remember being not interested in computer games. In the late 70's and early 80's I was really into those hand-held LCD games. They were the forerunners of every computer game ever made in my opinion. There were games like Tank Battle, Space Rescue, Sea Rescue, but also double screen games like Donkey Kong and Crazy Kong. Real hot stuff in those days. After that I had an early console game made by Philips: the Philips Video Pack. There was a small collection of about 100 games available for that machine. This was around the time Atari was selling that popular console machine of theirs. I never had that, though. When I dumped the Philips I bought myself a Commodore 64 and started programming in Basic first, then assembly. The C64 had some very cool machine code monitors and a limited number of assemblers, but I managed to write one or two games in assembly. Even tried to get one published, but that never worked out. After I sold the commodore I had no computer at all for a couple of years. From the ages 12 to about 16 I had no computer to work on whatsoever.
Advanced Computing
Only when I went started my studies in Information Science did I buy my first PC, an 8Mhz HeadStart XT, first without hard disk! Later I upgraded it and got a 20MB hard disk. During my studies I was tought Pascal programming, C, C++, 68000 assembly, Operating Systems and host of exotic programming languages and subjects like logical programming in Miranda, systems programming for the Minix OS (the forerunner of Linux), Databases, structured software development, etc.
I had an internship for about 4 months at AT&T, developing an API for a windowing system for ASCII terminals. This assignment tought me that programming was not for me, even though it had been the sole reason for me studying Information Science. I finished school and became a software engineer (Bachelor Of Science degree) in 1994.
Career
After school I got a job at a company making logistical software and I ran into the Magic development environment. There I started at an application programmer but soon drifted in the direction of project leader. Developing and giving courses to end users, designing software, deploying business critical applications became my full time profession. After about 4 years I decided to quit my job and find another. I dedicated a year to deploying Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems and learning something about x.400 technology. Right around the time my new employer decided to move his business to a new location, my EDI assignment was running at an end. I kind of rolled into organizing the technical side of the move. During the two or so months it took to set up our new network and internet connectivity I learned enough about internetworking to enable me to start working on organizing and setting up an E-Commerce environment for one of our clients. Through a twist of fate (and much of my own doing), this new client was also my former employer (the logistical software people).
The Love Of My Life
In 1992 I met my girlfriend Marianne. She was employed at the Utrecht Polytechnic where I studied. It didn't take long before we were living together in a pretty nice appartment which had a great view but lowsy neighbours. Well, the ones below at least. Marianne and I lived there for about two years before we decided to move to a town called Nieuwegein which is attached to Utrecht. Right before we moved I got involved in the Unreal (Epic Games' masterpiece) community.
| Marianne and I | Our Home In The Middle |
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Epic Obsession?
My curiosity got me to investigate other Epic titles until I ran into ZZT. Like several other members of the ZZT community I fell in love with it right away. When I found out that the source code to ZZT had been lost, I decided that I wanted to recreate ZZT from the ground up. This was probably the only thing in the world that could motivate me enough to pick up computer programming again! The project really started rolling when the community started showing an interest in it. I have even tried to get Epic a little more involved in the ZZT community and up until the time of writing this, they've been cooperative. I basically like everything that Epic does. In my opinion they are a unique bunch of people that have made a leading product with Unreal. Not only graphically speaking, but conceptually Unreal is the most advanced gaming product available to the entertainment business. Unreal is a Game Creation System (like ZZT!) which enables game makers to do what they do best: making games. Unreal allows them to concetrate on game design, texture and graphics, weapons, characters, music, sound and plot instead of having to worry about developing low-level hardware drivers and platform compatibility. With this, Epic hold the key to a leadership position in the entertainment business. In my opinion, Epic should concentrate on further developing this position and create games as a bonus activity, because it's so much fun to do. So if you're reading this Tim Sweeney or Mark Rein, let me know what you think, ok?
Wouter "WeP" Bovelander.
wbovela@wxs.nl
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