As with most early-to-mid twenty-somethings out there, I grew up on a healthy portion of video games. When I was about 6 or 7, my family invested in our first Nintendo, which changed our lives forever. Fortunately for us, it didn't shift our lives in the direction of endless bags of cheetoes and many sleepless nights... well... ok, maybe there was a bit of that. However, the sort of change I'm talking about involves more thought, more creativity, and more sheer will.
We wanted to know how the hell these things work.
Just about the same time we got our Nintendo, my father got me my first computer. At the time, I was the only child in my family deeply interested in computers. He set me up with an Apple ][+, a dinosaur of a computer, even at that time (1986). I mean geez! It didn't even have LOWER CASE! Also at that time, he gave me my very first programming book. It was the Apple manual on BASIC.
And so it began. I started hacking code non-stop. I would skip out on homework to write software. I would try to skip meals. I didn't want to sleep. I started down a path that would shape the rest of my life.
So now we come to college. During my high school years, I discovered two things that would pull me away from computers for a while: the bass guitar, and women. Both seemed like ample justification for ditching coding. I was also introduced to the IBM PC, which, after working with Apples my entire life, I wasn't completely thrilled about (I'm still a complete Apple fanatic, but the things are just too darn expensive). We'll get more into that in a while.
When I entered college, I thought I wanted to be a music major. I then decided, after about half a semester, that I didn't want to take something that I really enjoyed doing and turn it into a job. So I took my first IT course, and found out about Linux.
I got my first distro from a guy I used to work with at my hometown's public school district. It was Redhat 7.0, and it was awesome. This was 1999, just about the time the OS wars were really heating up. I set up a dual boot system on a Gateway PII - 400MHz that I had at the time for college. I was completely fascinated by the operating system, but at the time could find no real use for it. Sure, it was very stable, very secure, and very fast (especially on that 400MHz box), but the software wasn't compatible with the college's lab computers' software. But it had made an impression.
Fastforward to today, and why video games were at all important to this story.
About six months ago, I was talking to my younger brother, who is currently a graduate student in Computer Science at a major midwestern university. He had come up with this idea for making a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, much like World of Warcraft. He wanted to know if I was at all interested in helping him with the software development. He told me that he's fine with developing software to run under Windows XP (or any other flavor of Windows desktop OS), but he needed some help with the server-side engineering (FYI, we're planning on using Fedora Core 5 as the basis of the server OS). He also meantioned that our two other brothers would be in on the project.
And WolfWorkz Studios was born.
So that's it. We've formed an "idea", and hopefully this idea will turn into something. If it doesn't, at least we're going to learn something.