My first experience of Basic was in 1986 with the Acorn Electron, and I've been interested in programming ever since, although I've never become proficient enough to make a career out of it. On the Electron I created one or two short text adventures, which seemed amazing to me at the time. I continued to program in Basic on the Acorn 3000 and PC, but often experienced low frame rates as I aimed to create more complex games.

On leaving school I went to Edinburgh University, and for the first year studied computer science along with my maths degree, but then dropped the computing in favour of statistics, as I felt I was getting nowhere with it. I then had 2 years without programming at all, until I read an article about Blitz Basic in Edge Magazine and decided to take a look.

After graduating I moved back to Edinburgh again to study for an MSc in software engineering at Napier, but dropped out as it frustrated me (a similar scenario to the computer science), which finally made me realise the folly of full-time education. This left me with more time to spend on Blitz, but I've recently found it quite difficult to come up with new game concepts. I'm currently looking for work, probably in the field of data analysis, or whatever else comes up.