As I sit on the brink of shipping my first independent game, all the people who helped me along come to mind while I'm reflecting on the long journey to get here. One of those very special people is my mother. I have my mother to thank for being an independent and creative thinker. There are a lot of bumps in the road of becoming an adult from a child and she helped me through some of the more difficult and tangled paths.
Growing up in Bovina was hard for me in some ways. I've always had worlds and worlds and worlds that I create and hold in my imagination. Imagining how life could be different, better, or "what would happen if". A lot of people in Bovina would say "Yes... of course I support creative people." But when truly faced with one, the feedback could be kind of harsh. "That Neal boy is weird." "That Neal boy is a bad influence." "That Neal boy needs to keep his feet on the ground." Facing these kinds of comments when you are in elementary school was one thing, but junior high school was brutal.
My mom always encouraged me to be myself. If they don't like you, that's their problem. Don't be somebody else just to make other people happy. One day you'll find a group of people that can see what you can see. Mom always said sweet things about how smart I was and that people wouldn't always be so judgmental to me. She told me that I'd make the best friends I'd ever make in college and that all the other criticism I was being hit with would melt away. Was she ever correct!
Though Mom wasn't a programmer or a super technical person, one thing that she did do is help me get hold of every programming book that I could get my hands on. By fifth grade we had subscriptions to Byte magazine, Computer World, and a few others that had code samples in them. I had books on computer architecture, assembly language, BASIC programming language, Pascal, etc... you name it. She'd take me to computer stores to talk to the people running the stores about hardware and software. I was always a little bit short of cash to buy a book and she always helped me out with the spare change needed to finish the purchase.
If it wasn't computer books, it was Dungeons and Dragons books and magazines. Mom would take me to the Enchanted Sunmark in Clovis, NM. and I'd see novels, D&D books, and other role-playing games that fed my imagination and taught me that there were others out there in the world like me. Rather than seeking to confine my creative urges, Mom fed them and helped them to grow knowing that they would serve me very well.
This support was so important to me becoming a game developer and landing that first job at Turbine working on Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Thanks Mom!!! I hope your birthday is great!