It’s kind of a funny story. When I was very young my mother worked with computers that had used the punch card system. And, to her, as personal computers became something that was a known entity - it’s not like anybody had one but it was like, “Oh, personal computer, that’s the future,” was her reaction. Since I was a pretty smart kid she enrolled me in computer classes. I don’t even remember what kind of computer it was, like Sinclair or something, you know? And I learned basic. So, I could hook it up to the television set and I could make hearts go across the screen in different colors, you know? I could program it - me and my sister would get those books and we would program in basic to make whatever - whatever was in the book, we would make it. But then, also, we would get bored and go outside and play, you know? So, for us it was like give or take - it was just another toy, you know? And I knew how to use this toy. And she got me a Vic 20 Commodore machine and yeah, I played some games on it I guess, you know, but they didn’t - it wasn’t very deep. It didn’t affect me. I was just like, “Yeah, okay, that’s one of the things you do with a computer. You can type in it and save it to your cassette tape or you can play a little cartridge, you know whatever.” Then, at a certain point when I turned teenager I put the computer away, gave it to my nephew or something, didn’t care at all about computers. I was like, “I don’t even want to think about this stuff.” And I went off and was a teenage girl. Then, it wasn’t until later when I was maybe, nineteen or something, that, um, they were opening a computer lab in my college, uh, at Parson School of Design. Um, and it turned out that that was the highest paying work study job that you could possibly get and since I knew about computers I was like, “Hey, I’ll get a work study job in the computer lab - this new computer lab that’s opening.” So, yeah, I got in there and I was like, “Okay, I’m not going to geek out, you know?” It’s like - but then I suddenly discovered that I was really fascinated by the 3D rendering system that they had which was Crystal 3D. It was like, probably, like, you know, command line programming, you know, graphics programming sort of stuff and then you left it overnight to render and it was rendered to a slide, you know? Or, if you were making an animation you could render one frame per night or something and eventually it would come together in some sort of video. Um, and, um, they also had Mac computers which was very new - well, it wasn’t so new but it was like - to be used for, um, graphic designers and stuff like that. And the more I learned the more I got paid. I ended up knowing an awful lot about computers. Which I’m very thankful for because that is what changed my life back to, um, working with technology and art. I was in - I was studying sculpture and - but I started doing my drawing assignments in Photoshop 1.0 and having my drawing teacher go, “You can’t hand that in as an assignment. That’s not drawing - what we mean by, you know, that.” And I was like, “Oh, why not?” And I started doing all of these photo manipulations and just trying to figure out ways of, um, hey, I was aware of some, um, computational, um, art pioneers, you know, from the sixties. And - and I was really interested in why is this digital art thing not so important? Why isn’t it more important? And I was really interested in that. So, there wasn’t this notion of new media or anything like that. It was just a question of, “Well, how can I use computers for creative purposes? And so, um, that didn’t lead to video games. That led to a lot of different things but not video games and it especially led to me being very deeply involved with art on the web, um, and being interested in interactivity from that. Um, yeah, and then the video games came later, sort of when I was looking for something else besides client work and, um, messing around with like, you know, server technology. I was like, “Hey, let’s do something else. Yeah, we want to do something else. Let’s make video games,” became top of the list because we just suddenly had that moment of epiphany that this was interactive, this is art, let’s make a video game, how hard could it be?
