Ironshef Bio
Welcome to my Gaming Biography…
When I sat down to write this I thought, “Shit…I’ve been gaming for a long time on a lot of different systems…not all of them electronic. This is gonna be long.” And, well, it is. Also, to be technical, since I am writing it, this is really more of an autobiography than a biography, but you get the picture. Read on below and get a glimpse into why I love what I do here at ezGamerz. For some of you, this will be a trip down memory lane. I hope you enjoy. Feel free to comment and share this with others…
I Was This Close to Becoming a Cowboy (1977-1980)…
My “gaming career” began at age 3 when my folks bought me my first video game system. It was basic and I mean that in the most literal sense. Of course, there wasn’t much going on in the late ’70s when I
got my COMPUTER GAME SYSTEM for Christmas (it came in close second to my kick ass cowboy boots as “favorite present” that year). I didn’t even really know what I was doing at that point, but I know I was having fun. A year later came a little more sophistication with the Atari 2600 arcade classics. We had the system and some awesome games like Indy 500 (1977), Breakout (1978), Adventure (1979), Night Driver (1980) and Space Invaders (1980). But this was only the beginning…
Where Do I Go From Here – The Formative Years Part I (1980-1983)…
There I was, 6 years-old, sitting on the living room floor of my grandparents’ house in Lake Placid — the small town in upstate New York where my father grew up (1980 Winter Olympics anyone?). It was 1981. My older brother and I had gone for the summer to get some time with our dying grandmother. She had cancer and it was unlikely that she would make it much longer. Kind of a somber moment to call the genesis of my passion for gaming, but perhaps it was the inherent emotional connection that burned it so indelibly on my brain.
On that fateful morning as we sat there occupying our time with only God knows what (our Atari was at home in Texas), the door opened and my mother walked in. She had a few large bags tucked under her arms which were deposited unceremoniously on the couch in the living room. She looked down at my brother and me, smiling, “I know this isn’t much fun for you two, so I found something to help pass the time.” Had she known how much time it would help me pass from then until now, perhaps my mother would not have bought the gifts…or at least not used those particular words.
Opening one of the larger bags, she pulled out four shallow, rectangular boxes.
Some of you may recognize one or more of those boxes. If you recognize all of them…right on. That’s pretty hardcore. Sadly, I can’t put my hands on all of that classic material now. I’m pretty sure my older brother has it tucked away somewhere in his attic. Another topic for another day. On with the bio…
So, I was 6. Maybe I’d heard of D&D by then, maybe not…but I certainly hadn’t heard of Gamma World, Boot Hill or Gangbusters and I didn’t know much at all about RPGs. Well, I had Edward Packard’s 
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, The Cave of Time, but I hadn’t read it all (gimme a break, I was 6) and the connection wasn’t clear to me yet. Nevertheless, I did what any self-respecting, curious 6 year old would do – especially when sitting with his older brother. I tore into the boxes and started to rifle through the books and maps, the character sheets and the oddly-shaped dice. In a moment I was whisked away to fantasy worlds full of swords and sorcery, a post-apocalyptic Earth, the gritty border towns of the Wild West and the Roaring ’20s. It was magical. At the time, it was therapeutic.
My brother and I spent the next several weeks learning the rules and decided to focus first on D&D. There was just something very easy about identifying with wizards and warriors and mythical beasts. 
Flinging fireballs at hordes of orcs and crossing swords with kobolds sounded like loads of fun. And so it began. The seed of my passion was sown and it would be this love affair with role-playing games that led me ultimately to the computer. Well, that and my 3rd grade teacher at Stahl Elementary School in San Antonio, TX that let me and my classmates play Scott Adams’ Pirate’s Adventure if we got all of our work done in class and behaved appropriately.
I should note at this point that we still had our Atari that gave way to the Colecovision in 1982, which I remember fondly (and borderline shamefully) for the title Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle. It was around this same time that the Dark Tower game came out and I’d also gotten my hands on Gary Gygax and Company’s Dungeon! board game. And, while consoles and board games would continue to be an avenue for my voracious gaming appetite, it was really the PC that would slake my thirst.
Tabletops, Consoles and Computers – The Formative Years Part II (1983-1993)…
Like I mentioned earlier, it was my 3rd grade teacher that introduced me to computer games but it wasn’t until a trip to Waldenbooks in late 1982, early 1983 that things really got interesting. Who remembers the 1980 Infocom classic Zork? I do and it was my true introduction to PC gaming. I saw the game in the video game section at the bookstore and begged my mom to get it. She acquiesced. That game kept me enthralled until my eyes bled. The fact that it was purely text didn’t matter. I’d played so much D&D by that point that my imagination was enough to bring that brilliant story to life and the brilliant stories that would follow it (Zork II, Zork III, Spellbreaker, Beyond Zork, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and countless others). It wasn’t surprising for me to learn years later — when I actually knew what the Internet was and how to find information on it (thanks CompuServe!) — that the dudes who started Infocom were originally a research group at MIT. 
The pure magic of their adventures kept me playing Infocom games for years…and happily so. Unfortunately, I was so busy with them that I missed out on some classics. Now, I’m not terribly prone to regret, but I do shed a quiet tear or two that I never got on the bus with either Wizardry or Ultima, both of which came out before the 1985 Interplay/EA classic Tales of the Unknown – The Bard’s Tale. I did, however, gobble that one up as well as its two sequels, The Destiny Knight and Thief of Fate. Mind you, I was playing these on an Apple IIe — but I guarantee that I enjoyed every last second of green-screened goodness. Those games and the continuous stream of solid Infocom titles kept me busy along with Mike Tyson’s PunchOut on the NES, which was a regular distraction after school in 1987. I can still hear that cut scene theme music in my head as Little Mac trucks along during his training runs.
In 1988 things really started to heat up. This was junior and senior high school for me and I was pretty busy with part-time jobs, sports and other extracurricular activities…but I always found time for gaming. In fact, a small group of close friends formed a regular D&D group. My brother and I had fallen out of playing since we were at that age where we were usually trying to kick each others ass. So, this was a nice return to an old favorite. Sweetening the deal, one of the guys in our group had a Commodore64. 
It wasn’t long before that meant countless nights sleeping over and staring bleary-eyed at Pools of Radiance until the early hours of the morning. The late nights didn’t subside as Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI) kept us busy with the annual installments of their Gold Box series. Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990) and Pools of Darkness (1991) were awesome. In 1991 I also got my hands on the Sega Genesis with the special Joe Montana Football edition. That game and Uncharted Waters were both released in ‘91 and both were solid. Montana’s football game, while less authentic than John Madden Football, was tons of fun with its arcade feel and pass-heavy offense. Uncharted Waters was a masterpiece. You had an interesting story, combat and commerce all in one. This was one of the first titles that really cemented my Completionist gaming philosophy. No matter how long it took me, I wanted to do it all. And Final Fantasy IV on the SNES was no exception. I logged countless hours on that gem.
The renewed exposure to D&D (well into its Advanced incarnation at this point), SSI’s Gold Box series, the Sega Genesis and Super NES kept me gaming comfortably into college.
Time to Hit the Books, Right? – The College Years (1993 – 1997)…
The first few years of college were focused on getting my bearings in D.C. and keeping my head down with classes. Entering my junior year, though, I had things pretty well under control and started to miss my gaming. I wasn’t interested in joining a local RPG group and my Apple IIe had lost its lustre as far as games were concerned (yeah, I brought that puppy with me to school…imagine if you had to deal with something like that these days). Fortunately, AOL was gaining momentum and through my account with them I got access to a game called Gemstone III by Simutronics Corp. A fully text-based MMORPG (they technically refer to themselves as a MUD), Gemstone was an eye-opener. I’d never played anything online before. I loved it. The content of the game kicked ass and it could be shared with friends or complete strangers regardless of distance. I burned a ton of hours playing GSIII through 1995 and into 1996 when Simutronics delivered a new world for us to enjoy. DragonRealms was another high fantasy MMORPG based on the same game world, just set at a different time. It was new and I jumped on it, eager for a chance to be in on the ground floor.
The use-based skill progression system in Simutronics’ Interactive Fiction Engine (IFE) was awesome. In fact, I look back at that now and wish there were more current MMOs that used the same type of use-based system (Galaxies and Fallen Earth are two stand out exceptions). Another unique aspect of DR was the dynamic content constantly being created by the Gamemasters. Simutronics took (and still takes, I imagine) considerable pride in their focus on delivering fresh, unique content through its network of Gamemasters constantly patrolling the realm. I distinctly remember sitting in the middle of town one evening when a horde of baddies swarmed in, catching the collected adventurers completely off guard. If you were online that night, you got to participate. If you weren’t…tough luck. It wasn’t a situation where you could just walk up to a quest giver, click a few buttons or wander through an instance portal and get the same experience. It was real. It was cool. It definitely made you feel like you were part of the story. I think games these days need more of that shit.
I was hooked and online gaming had me on lockdown until I graduated.
Time to Get a Job and Grow Up -The Pretending to Be an Adult Years (1998 – Now)
I was still busy with DragonRealms after college but I started to get the itch for something graphical. Computer technology was advancing rapidly and I figured I could find something that gave me the magic of DragonRealms…with graphics. Remember when I mentioned missing the bus on Ultima? Had I been paying better attention, I probably would have already jumped into Ultima Online which released in 1997. But, I wasn’t paying better attention. So I didn’t. I started playing Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in ‘97, which was a killer game (MS-DOS, baby!) and then in 1998 BioWare brought us Baldur’s Gate, 
which was easily deserving of the recent induction into the IGN Video Game Hall of Fame. All told, I’ve probably played through that game 10 times. I snatched up Tales of the Sword Coast as soon as it was available and those two games kept me busy for a long time..but I still yearned for that online feel. So, when I started reading about Everquest I was really jazzed. I met the Mindflyer around this time and we both turned up to our local CompUSA to grab our copy on release day in 1999. Getting home, we installed, fired it up and then fell out of our chairs. Not from excitement. We were so disappointed with the way it looked that we yanked it, packed it up and returned it that day. I also checked out Lineage which was similarly disappointing from a visual perspective. With these two examples, I thought to myself. “If the only advantage these games have over DragonRealms are their graphics and those suck…why bother?” So I didn’t. Burned out on DragonRealms I instead turned to a series of PC games and dove into consoles again.
I played a bunch of different stuff, including alot of RTS titles, RPGs, Sports and more. In no particular order – Baldur’s Gate II, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II, Civilization III, SimCity 3000 & 4, Caesar, Empire Earth, Age of Empires I-III, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Gothic, Pirates, Arcanum, Ghost Recon, Driver, SpecOps, GTA II, GTA III, Fable, Tiger Woods Golf, NCAA Football, Madden, NHL Hitz and Gladius- all made it into the rotation at one point or another. The list could go on for quite awhile, but maybe I’ll just do some kind of gaming inventory post at some point in the future. Then, in 2003, I was finally introduced to a graphical MMORPG that got me hooked. I was working a brief stint in 
the QA department at EA. My hands were full working on games like Command & Conquer: Generals, Medal of Honor, Nascar, NCAA and Madden. But none of those titles were top on the minds of the guys I worked with. It wasn’t even Battlefield: 1942, which we would play in multiplayer mode with 20 dudes at lunchtime (now THAT was a blast!…just something terribly cool about fraggin’ your buddy and then screaming across the room about how you just owned him). No, it wasn’t any of those games. Everyone was talking about Star Wars: Galaxies. All conversations during breaks were consumed by it. You could see withdrawal symptoms setting in with some of the guys who’d been away from it for too long. They loved it and that kind of passion for something is infectious. On top of all that, Mindflyer was telling me that he’d just started an account and I really should jump in. With a newly renovated rig I made the plunge. SWG was insane. Maybe I should have seen it in the stars since LucasArts had officially announced the name of the game on my birthday in 2000 (same day as the publishing of this bio…November 29). Sure, the quests sucked or were altogether nonexistent. It wasn’t terribly cohesive…but who cares? It was sandbox in the truest sense. I could be whatever I wanted to be. I’m still waiting for an MMORPG to provide the same killer combination of player advancement, crafting complexity, rich economy and city building that SWG had. Obviously, this was all pre-NGE and I certainly haven’t played every MMORPG since…but there just hasn’t been anything that touched it. In November of 2004 I jumped ship and joined the mass exodus to World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game ever since.
There was a brief hiatus from Warcraft in part of 2007 and 2008 during which I tried out games like Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard, Everquest II, Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan. Each had something interesting, but none matched the fun factor of WoW. LOTRO held my attention for awhile. I loved the deed system, especially the deeds associated with not dying. Vanguard had promise but it had such a disastrous launch that it left a sour taste. I have to admit, though, playing a Kurashasa Disciple felt really cool. That was the ultimate solo class. It got old after awhile, though, falling through the world and floating to my death every time I logged in. Rumor has it that they’ve made some significant improvements in the past year so who knows…maybe I’ll give them another shot. Ultimately, I ended up back with Warcraft. That and my consoles are keeping me plenty busy. Well, that, my consoles and my four kids are keeping me plenty busy. Oh…and ezGamerz. And that brings us up to the present.
I hope you enjoyed the story. More than that, I hope it did its job in conveying how much I love this shit. It’s what I do. And I’m thrilled to be able to make my contribution to this industry, however meager, because it has contributed so much to my life over the years. Ultimately, though, it’s all of you that make me get up every morning to bring you ezGamerz. I’ve always been a huge fan of entertaining people. Hopefully, our little slice of the internet pie does just that. If we’ve succeeded let us know. Hell, let us know if we’ve failed too. We have pretty thick skin. Leave a comment on a post…and tweet it too! Stop by the ezGamerz Forums and start a thread. Head over to our contact form and drop us a line. Follow a link to one of our sponsors and buy something.
With our personal motivation and your feedback, we will keep working to make ezGamerz a kick ass place to visit online. Thanks for your attention. Now go and get your game on!
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[...] Ironshef Bio [...]
What, no mention of our late night gaming sessions with NHL Hitz 20-03? Dammit, that game ruled! HOCKEY MONKEY!!!
Damnit! Ya know…as I was writing that, I kept thinking to myself, “I'm leaving stuff out…I'm definitely leaving stuff out.”
I probably could have mentioned the cooperative runs we used to do in Ghost Recon…or the long nights of Xbox Live…
Maybe I'll revisit this in the future and edit in some of the glaring omissions.
[...] history of that love affair is not the point of this post, so I’ll direct you to the Ironshef biography over on ezGamerz if you want to digest the entire back story. Instead, the point of this post is to [...]