Having grown up through the late eighties and early nineties in a small two bedroom single-wide trailer, shared with my mother, father, two sisters and younger brother I believe I have a unique gaming experience. If it didn’t have more than one player, we just wouldn’t get it. Our father, 57 now, was an avid gamer in the seventies and eighties, and even through today. He’s probably playing GriD as I write this. So, naturally, we had a C64, NES and a Genesis. Every game we had was geared towards two or more people so that when he was not in the mill or the wood treatment plant we could enjoy some kind of semi-relaxing activity together.

I can remember him calling the school, saying that I was sick, so that we could destroy The Shredder in TMNT II: The Arcade Game. Or the day we rented Toe Jam & Earl. The following excursion was definitely one for laughs. Accidentally triggering rocket skates right next to the edge of a level and falling and falling and falling. And as I grew older and my brother Manareth began getting better with a controller, we began playing more and more. Never alone, unless the other wasn’t up to it. But on those days I was allowed to turn on the 386. I played my copy of Wing Commander 2, fighting through the storyline and yelling the word "Noooooooo!" when Spirit was killed. And I always wondered to myself, why weren’t all games playable with friends or family? I could never imagine how it could break a story, and still can’t. My brother and I, 20 and 25 respectively, still wonder why more games are not cooperative play. How can they not benefit from allowing just four players to play together. I don’t and have never cared for deathmatch games. They aren’t interesting to me. I don’t want to know how well you can kill me. I want to know how well we can communicate to accomplish a goal.

And this is where my brother and I begin our quest to create a game. We are not well versed in any of the applications or programming languages necessary to create a beautiful or well rendered game. But you must learn to crawl before you can walk. And we have crawled and crawled and crawled. There have been brainstorming sessions about what kinds of games we would like to play. Manareth has spent many hours programming, reading through tutorials, writing rudimentary 3d modeling applications. And there have been many, many hours spent in various raster and vector based graphics applications. And now, we should be able to walk. If only ever so slowly and cautiously while holding on to the coffee table.