Who am I?? Why am I here?? Why do you ask?? I'll tell you.

I was born in the year 0 AP (After Pong or 1970 if you prefer) in California. My parents never really took me out anywhere, so I had never seen an arcade game pre-1978. I just moved to a new city that year, and that's how games came into my life. There was a liquor store one block up the street that I would always go to to buy baseball cards whenever I got my allowance. One day in 1979, that store got an Asteroids machine. The first day I saw it, I was in total awe. That day, I changed from baseball cards to quarters. Funny thing is, I completely, totally, SUCKED at Asteroids. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of quarters I pumped into that machine, I could never score more than 12,000 points :P

The next year, they got Pac-Man, and that's when I became good. I had the patterns down, and could consistently get to the 6th key. Every game they got after that, I would be neighborhood champ or close to it. Kangaroo, Bump 'n' Jump, Espial, Centipede, Carnival, Gorf, etc. I was the guy that people would crowd around to watch play, and that felt pretty good back then, because I was never really the popular kid.

Then one day, they got Mr. Do! I can't explain why, but I just had a ton of fun on that game, and I totally ROCKED it. I was the only person around where I lived that scored over a million (my high score was approx. 1.5 million back then), cleared past level 100, and also one day on a bet from the liquor store owner, I completely cleared Stage 1 of grass (imagine the whole screen black with just Mr. Do!, a monster, and one cherry; it was hard back then).

I've also owned practically every home sytem from Atari Pong all the way through to the Nintendo Wii.

When I finally got a computer with a modem, I signed up with my free AOL trial (yuck!!), and was doing a search for Mr. Do! stuff on Yahoo, when I came upon a link to (the now defunct) emux.com, which then brought me to Dave's Video Game Classics and MAME. When I fired up Mr. Do! on MAME, I was in gaming heaven, and I've been into emulation since.