The arcade is where I got my first taste of videogaming - pong and lunar lander were my first recollections of gaming.

I remember my brother getting his Pong game to play on our television.

Shortly thereafter, I worked my butt off selling newspapers to earn enough money to buy my very own Atari 2600. I was 14 at the time, and I got it at the local Tipton store. It came with Combat.

I eventually owned (or played courtesy of friends) the Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Odyssey, Sega Master System, Intellivision, Colecovision, Vectrex(every game was ' Battle Zone' style), Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Commodore 64, Gameboy, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Gameboy Color, Playstation, Sega Dreamcast(my first online gaming experience), Gameboy Advance, PC, Playstation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube (released after the XBOX, but still in my list of systems).

I was hooked on the XBOX since about a year prior to it' s release. My system pre-order was placed at about that time, and reviewed every website that even mentioned a word about the XBOX or Microsoft. I was the first person to walk away from the midnight launch at my local Gamestop (Babbages, back then) with everyone in line applauding - Oh, the excitement and anticipation of getting to play any of the three launch titles (Halo, Dead or Alive3, and Air Force Delta Storm) that I had purchased!!!

Life (on- and off-line) with XBOX has been responsible for some of the best gaming in my life, and I cannot imagine a future without it...and yet, I look forward to experiencing XBOX 2.

Videogaming has been in my blood for some 26+ years now. The games I enjoy have changed somewhat, but I have no intentions of giving up gaming until the day someone can pry the controller from my cold, dead fingers.