About Jay

I’ve been playing video games since I was first introduced to them on my Dad’s Atari 2600. Growing up I played a lot of games on my 286-computer and NES. I was raised on shows like Video and Arcade Top 10 and Electric Playground. I used to dream about being a video game designer, and in my teenager years taught myself BASIC and C++ and then developed a series of small real-time strategy games, RPGs, and Mario-clones that I played with my friends.

These days my interest in games has transformed into playing and discussing them online, primarily through my Let's Play series. My series has also spurred me back into the realm of collecting, and I have been accumulating as many rare and unique controllers and systems as I can. On that point, I have nearly completed a collection of every NES zapper game ever made. And yeah, that's exciting to me!

Whether it’s designing, collecting, playing, or just talking about games, it’s safe to say that I am a gamer, through and through.

About the Series

In this series I am trying out every game in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. In my videos I aim to capture the feeling of hanging out with a friend on a Saturday and trying an old game for the first time. Each week I pick two random games to play and record the results. While I play, I chat. As I seek to both educate and entertain, for each game I include some history, trivia, discussion, and good humored-nitpicking. Ultimately, I provide my own thoughts on the game in question, and whether I think it is a must-play game.

Thinking more long-term, I play 100 games from the book per year. To complete my quest it will therefore take 10 years plus a day. I intentionally skew toward older games, meaning that although the book includes numerous entries from the 2010's, I don't plan to play many of them until my final years of this series (~2025). In this way, my series will always be geared towards retro games.