I've chosen to work in a familly company for various reasons instead of going to college. Father sells Internet services and computers. I make websites and web applications in my working days. I also design flyers and visual documents for Nicole. I started believing I was going to earn much money. It's nothing near that. Computer games are my passion. They combine artistic skills that I like : drawing, coding or programming and music. I played ||{1}|| and Nibbles for the first time in elementary school. Computer games evolved since then; colors have appeared, real music has replaced the old pc speaker sound effects. I live in ||{1}||, a small country in west Africa, not developped enough. We've participated ||{1}|| in Germany this year. My first personal computer was given by my brother before he moved to the United States for his studies. It was a Pentium 133 MHZ, 32Mb of RAM. I kept it until the beginning of my last year in high school. This is, I think, the reason why I prefer 2D graphics to 3D, simple softwares and games to big ones. While being held behind, I have encountered great people and walked the path of the computers' evolution that many have missed. Many of these great people were artists and programmers. Karl Maritaud a.k.a. X-man in the field was one of them. He showed me what can be done with single colored pixels, put together. Evil Nun is the best of his work. Karl and all the others belong to what is called the Scene or the Demo Scene. The Demo Scene is disappearing little by little. Cougar, Danny, Acryl were good 2D graphics artists. They own big portfolios. I admire X-man because he kept his art "Old-School" and this is rare. Real 2D "Old-School" art were drawn with a 256 colors palette, pixel by pixel, using simple rough brushes. Nowadays computers are rendering and smoothing everything. For me, coding -programming a computer- is an art. ||{1}|| is an excellent coder. She made the Action Arcade Adventure Set to teach 2D games programming in 1994. I didn't know how to program then, but last year I've finished the book. Jazz Jack Rabbit was the first platform game I've enjoyed on the PC (SEGA and Super Famicom gaming systems were popular at the time). The music of the game are still fresh in my head, especially the vocals from the last stage (demonius, I think) in the first world. The 3D games I've played were Wolfeinstein 3D, Doom and Duke Nukem. Shortly after Eidos released Tomb Raider, I upgraded our RAM to 64 to be able to control that cutie girl named Lara Croft. I had fun learning B.A.S.I.C. with Microsoft QuickBasic in secondary school. I thought Bill Gates wrote it which is not true. Graphics were really slow to code with BASIC, so I decided to learn C. C was so long to learn that I ended up wandering, with no real realisation. I also needed a good PC to run new compilers. Late 2004 and early 2005, ||{1}|| changed my life. He taught me what goals are, and how to set them. He taught me more than I've learnt in 18 years of existence, in less than one year. Reading his articles, makes me remember my old goals "being a good 2D graphics artist", "write my own game" and "compose music". These souvenirs can actually become goals today because I still feel like accomplishing them.