I just wanted to play games

I’m sitting next to my mom in the little office of our house in North Carolina. I’m maybe 4 or 5 years old, staring at the computer screen as MS-DOS boots up. My mom types a few things out and pops a floppy disk into the front of the computer. While we’re waiting on the install, I take the instruction booklet that came with the game and flip through the pages looking at the pictures.

That is one of my first vivid memories of video games and computers. My mom would get a new game like Mystic Towers or Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate, and I’d sit with my legs tucked under me in one of those old chairs upholstered in the scratchiest carpet you ever felt, trying to figure out how to get Zanthia the Alchemist to the next area.

My mom was a wonderful influence. She would sit and play with me and help me solve the puzzles. We even had a notebook of solutions we’d figured out. She would go to the library to use the internet, search forums or email the authors of these games for walkthroughs, and bring them home printed out so she could give me little hints if I got stuck. Later, when I got a bit more capable (and learned how to read), I discovered that the old manuals even had the cheat codes printed right there in them. Those were the days.

The memories come in small bursts now, but some little moments are still vivid. It’s funny to go back and look at the low-res graphics and think, “No way, I remember it looking so real.”

For a long time I just wanted to play video games. They were these incredible ways to “play pretend,” as most kids did in the 90s. First it was Legend of Kyrandia, Mystic Towers, Hocus Pocus… then the games on my dad’s Mac during our summers in Utah, where he was the production manager for the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Then it was downloading the GTA 2 demo on my grandfather Bob’s computer from 10 pm till 3 am. Bob bought a GPU back when AGP and PCI were at war. That opened up The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3 and modding. The gaming just exploded from there.

I first remember looking at computers beyond gaming probably around the time DSL became a thing. Wi-Fi was becoming a standard, and I had to learn how to set up a network, what the settings meant and how it all worked. Then there were the LimeWire days, trying to pirate music or movies or even more games. I caught my fair share of viruses. I learned to find and zap them in safe mode or from a boot disk, or just call it a loss, wipe the system, reinstall Windows XP and pray I didn’t mess it up again. Because back in those days, reinstalling Windows was your entire day’s plan ruined. IDE can kick rocks.

Maybe around the time I was 14, I realized I’d broken and repaired enough of my own stuff that I could potentially make a living doing something around computers. At first I wanted to build video games. One Christmas I got a Visual Basic for gaming book, but it was a little above my head. School and life were becoming major issues for me, so I wasn’t spending my free time on more learning.

But that was also when I stepped into modding. Nexus Mods and old forums for The Sims 2 mods. I’d burn them to CDs from the internet-connected computer downstairs and carry them up to the little slimline Gateway in my bedroom. After that StarCraft took hold, and I spent a lot of time using the editor to create scenarios for my friends and me to play. That was probably the first time I got really into building things. Shortly afterward I got a job at my local Best Buy.

It didn’t take long to discover that retail was not for me. I wanted to help people make the right decision way too much. I was on thin ice after convincing a customer to build his own PC instead of buying some Alienware thing we had on the shelf. The final straw was when a friend’s dad came into the store asking if I was there and if her laptop was ready. I’d been helping her on the side. That comment was enough for one of the managers to convince me to resign instead of being fired for conflict of interest.

All of that happened about 4 or 5 months after I’d decided, with my parents’ approval, to drop out of high school. I had a job, I knew what I liked and what I wanted to do, and school was boring. The plan was to drop out, get my GED and skip ahead to college. I managed the first 2 steps in about a month. Turned out, though, UAB, where my dad was a professor (half tuition would have been great), didn’t accept anyone with a GED until they were 19. Somehow that fact escaped all of us. Without a job or a solid plan, I shifted over to restaurants.

I worked in food service for a solid 8 years. I still helped friends and started my own little side business, Acceleration IT (I even had invoice forms made up in triplicate!), but working with computers took a backseat. Mostly I just played games. I finally settled into a family-owned Italian place where I fell in love with the incredibly romantic idea of being a chef. I was convinced I was going to refine the craft of cooking and take it as far as I could. The daydream was to own a restaurant and bar, some little gastropub with an apartment up top. Bob’s Burgers, eat your heart out.

But then I reconnected with Krista, my high school sweetheart. I’d never stopped thinking about her. We rekindled a relationship and she had lofty goals. She was going to go to Auburn for vet school. All it took was for her to say, “You love computers. You should go get a certification, get your foot in the door at some tech place and do that for a living.” Within 3 months, I had CompTIA A+ and a job with a local PC repair and managed services shop.

Games still held most of my free time. I’d created a solid community around DotA 2. Streaming was becoming a thing, and I thought I might become a professional gamer while I did the computer work too.

Shortly after I got the job, we found out Krista had gotten into Auburn. She was going to move. About a month before the move, after we’d already signed a lease for a townhouse, I found out from her dad that a position was open with his company, Ricoh. It paid what I needed to make and was still a step up in my career. I drove halfway down and interviewed in a Huddle House with the hiring manager. He loved what I brought to the table, and I started 1 week after Krista and I moved into the townhouse.

The job with Ricoh at Auburn University was where I got to stretch my legs. I was managing the student printing system and printer fleet, creating reports and presenting to directors and the CIO of a major university.

I continued to play DotA 2, but eventually I had to admit I wasn’t going to take it any farther or make real money with it. I missed the window and, let’s be honest, I probably didn’t have the personality for that line of work. So I leaned further into the technical aspects of my job and started bringing more of that home. The line between personal and work projects began to blur. I flashed Tomato firmware onto my Netgear router so I could work with VLANs and multiple SSIDs. The rest of that is in another blog post.

Games certainly got me into computing and networking. Hosting game servers for friends, setting up Hamachi, building modded Valheim servers with consistent populations of 20 players at a time. The Plex server, the automation and request system behind it. Docker, etc. All of these were great projects. Games even inform my design decisions now that I’m able to build things faster than ever before with the help of AI.

I’d been considering how to make this site, Probablyfine.dev, more personal, more my own, and rely less on AI for its ongoing evolution. It started as a way to get myself out there and show what I could do with AI now that this technology exists to bring your daydreams into reality. But for me, it’s become much more than that. It’s becoming a tool that reconnects me with parts of my life I haven’t thought of in years. Things I’ve blocked out or forgotten for one reason or another.

I initially remembered Hocus Pocus, Mystic Towers and Kyrandia. Then I remembered the games I’d play on the Mac in the hotel we stayed at in Utah. I’d spent so much time playing them, and those memories sparked my interest in hunting them down. As soon as Claude mentioned the names and details about the games, everything flooded back. Almost instantly. I remembered Chrysanthemum, I remembered Armor, I remembered the insects and Galaga-esque gameplay. It was a visceral recovery of memories that had been blocked out by adjacent trauma.

I wanted to see these old games again with fresh, adult eyes. They were such an integral part of my life and how I got here that I want to share them with anyone who would be even remotely interested. Seeing the path my life has taken through games, revisiting where they started, and reading the messages in their files from their creators have really helped me make sense of my life.

And maybe I can finally make a game too.

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How this one was made. I wrote the original prose in chat, working through questions about the games and the memories around them. Claude helped find the old games and discs. Codex helped with research, structure, grammar, and cutting repetition. I reviewed and approved the final edit. This is the first post here to start entirely from my own prose. The arcade was built with AI assistance.

The labels and process notes are explained in how I use AI.