So, first thing's first, my name is Andrew and my nickname is tzahranul (which is to say a stylized way of being called The Peasant, nickname I got in highschool but I can't really remember how or why). I reached out this forum by reading an article about collectors of unreleased builds of video games on a Gawker website (kotaku I think?) so I starded lurking for, uhm like 20 minutes before the combine fellow popped up and asked me to register. I then figured I might eventually want to board this craze of unreleased builds as I really enjoyed how a game evolved back when I did QA at EA games. Growing up in eastern Europe, gaming was at first a rare thing in my country (of Romania) but I could say I was in luck as my grandpa used to be the head of ICI (Central Institute of Informatics) before the fall of the communist regime (where he would build Spectrum Clones or digitize appliances for different institutes) so he would travel alot outside the country (only a lucky few managed to have that privillege). As a result, I had access to a great variety of games through my mother (as I never met my grandpa because he was "silenced" by the secret services because he has chosen to pick up Siemens computers back in the 80's for the Post Ofices in here, and the ruskies where not so glad) like casette/tape based games and machines, from a real early age (what was I, 4?).My mum would make big efforts to buy me PC Magazine issues from France along with different games (you can't imagine how nice it was to be the literally only kid in the block with fax modem internet geting hyped for the never finished Worlds Of Anachronox with friends) and although I had access to consoles (like the N64/Snes/Jaguar and their afferent clones that flooded the market around here after the communist fall, with cartridges that would promisse an awesome game or 99in1 and in the end would be the same duckhunt/highway game) I ended up spending most of the time on PC's (my first was a Felix PC or a silly IBM clone depending on your pov) so I grew up along with the PC craze. One of my strangest early memories was the moment I discovered a DOS porn game called Lula on my mum's 1997 Pentium 2 computer (you should understand that foreign hardware costed dollars, and in my country the exchange rate was fucked up so with the money you would spend on a PC you could also buy an apartment or a house). In time I became an avid gamer and decided after finishing highschool I would like to pursue gaming. Right now I am studying animation and game design but I wish I could make it next year to a different university, implicitly the one of movie making because I consider such an education could grow up on me (and because I consider gaming has alot to learn from older arts, specifically this one when it comes to lore and character creation). For the time being I am overwhelmed with homework (session here) and I haven't managed to secure time to play a lousy match of Hearthstone so I will lurk allot. I hope to meet interesting people around here and learn a thing or two about hardware/coding/ gaming history in general.
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