January 2015, ViperTKD Games is founded!
ViperTKD Games was founded in January 2015 to fulfill my dream and passion of making video games.
Video games have always been my passion. My dad bought his first computer when I was six years old. It was a TRS-80 Color Computer from Tandy also known as Coco I. To be able to play games, I had to type the code written in Basic from a magazine to which my dad was subscribing called The Rainbow.
I taught myself Basic by typing games from the magazines and soon enough, I was able to understand the code enough to modify it and change the behavior of the games. Few years later, my dad bought himself an Atari ST (1040ST) computer, not so long after its release, which gave me more time on the TRS-80. By the end of elementary school, I was able to create simple games on my own. I was also starting to teach myself Assembler on the TRS-80, but the games were way more attractive on the Atari, and I began to spend more and more time on it.
Seeing that my brother and I were spending more and more time on his Atari, my dad bought us an Atari 520ST. On the Atari, I discovered the STOS Basic, a version of Basic designed for creating games. I learned the language and dabbled in it for a while, but that would be only years later that I would release my first real video game.
While I was in high school, I started developing my first video game on a PC using C and assembler. I had taught myself C and Assembler using Turbo C++ and Turbo Assembler from Borland. I released my first game as a Shareware at the end of the 80’s. The game was a simple word game where you had to guess the word from mixed letters. The game had 256 colors graphics and at the time, that was quite the feat! That was the era of Space Quest III, King Quest IV, and Police Quest II; all well-known games from the big game company Sierra Online. And all these games were in 16 colors.
I didn’t make a lot of money with the game but just enough to cover my fees that were mainly long distance charges to upload the game to many BBS. It was an excellent experience but as I was ending high school, my career was starting as a developer and time to develop games was more scarce. Game development company were getting bigger and bigger with a bigger budget, so it was harder to create something to rival with them, and I was focusing more on my career.
Now many years have passed, and although I did not release other games until starting ViperTKD Games, I always remained a fan of video games and kept playing during my spare time. Now with the Indie wave and the evolution of the game development tools, I think it is time to return to my passion and make video games, and this is why ViperTKD Games is born!