STAFF PROFILE: TOM, STG PROGRAMMER
What is your background?
I am English, born in London in 1970. I am a farmer's son, and have lived most of my life on my parents' farm, firstly in Wales on a 75 acre smallholding, then later in Devon on a smaller 36 acres. We produced organic vegetables and used to sell them to many health food shops around Devon. Like all good sons, I was supposed to take over from my father and carry on the farming tradition. So what went wrong?
I found after I got my ZX81 that computers were a lot more fun! I taught myself BASIC, and then after getting a ZX Spectrum I learnt Z80 assembly and spent rather a lot of time debugging other people's code and games to find out how things were done. When the Commodore Amiga came out, things got even better as I moved onto 68000 assembly, and became part of the famous 'Amiga scene' – a collection of enthusiasts who formed into groups that competed against each other in competitions. I joined a group called Nerve Axis as the main coder, whose members are now some of my closest friends. We produced two demos, 'Pulse' and 'Relic', both of which won first prize in the 'Assembly' demo competition in Helsinki.
So what was I doing for work during this time? Water bottling. For 10 years in a small factory in the heart of Devon I was the engineer at a spring water bottling plant. I even fitted an Amiga to a shrink-wrapping machine to control it after the original internals broke! In the evenings I would be programming away feverishly working on the latest voxel engine or other routines for the demos.
In 2000, I decided I could be bottling for the rest of my life, and that I should be doing what I enjoy doing best for a living – Programming. |
