I really like arcade games and like the '80s and early '90s kind of games, just because there's a real kind of naivete to them, but there's like a real inventiveness to it as well.
As for my favorite games growing up, if I were to mention a game other than 'Gradius', it would have to be 'Xevious'.
When I was a kid, we never had a videogame in my house. But my cousin did, and each time I went to her house I was able to play 'Tetris' and 'Mario.' Those were the only two games I played as a child.
When I was growing up, I did go to the arcade. We had a neighborhood arcade, and my friends and I would go fairly regularly.
My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.
I'm pretty good at video games, but I'm the champ when it comes to pinball, and that's just because it's old-fashion like I am. I can't get enough of pinball.
I'm an old guy, so I started out playing 'Pong' with my brothers, and 'Mario Bros.' and whatnot. But we really got involved and got intense when 'Tecmo Super Bowl' came out. That's when we really started playing video games, and it got intense.
I was not the kid that hung out at the arcade.
I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. There was another game called 'Tempest' that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.
Growing up in Florida, it rained a lot, so we spent a lot of time indoors. I used to love Frogger. I got a lot of use out of that and Ms. Pac-man on my little Atari.
If I was going to play any video game, it'd be things like 'Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!,' 'Street Fighter' and 'Mortal Kombat.'
As a kid, I used to love going to the arcade. I used to tell my parents I was working on my hand-eye coordination. It was probably just a way to get more quarters from them.
I restore vintage Atari XY arcade video game machines.
