Hello.

I am aiming to bring some much needed youthfulness, good looks and professionalism to the show.

My earliest gaming memories were playing some sort of breakout clone at my uncle's on what I vaguely remember to be an Amstrad CPC, and I played a few things at other peoples houses until I ended up getting a few LCD games and the VFD Missile Invader. Then on cub scout camp my mate had this "new" thing called a game boy and some game called Tetris, which didn't sound much cop when he said "you have shapes and move them to make complete lines", but once I played it, it instantly made sense and I had to get one for my birthday a few weeks later.

The game boy combined with playing NES at some friends' houses and reading Future Publishing's Total! Nintendo based magazine naturally led me to saving up to buy a SNES shortly after release, and then later a Nintendo 64. I narrowly avoided becoming a full fanboy due to most of my mates having Mega Drives (or Genesis), Saturns, Playstations and the odd "weirdo" with a Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500 or 1200 (and my mate and his brother that bought a Jaguar on launch day).

I went through my early life selling consoles and game collections to fund the next one, up until the point where I was fed up of buying expensive Nintendo 64 cartridges and decided to sell it all and focus on PC gaming instead as I was enjoying them just as much, in between learning HTML 2.0 and rudimentary 3D modelling.

The Dreamcast managed to suck me back into console gaming though, after my mate bought one on launch day, and I could tell that it was going to be a machine that I would like to have, so I bought one a week later and enjoyed a good couple of years being able to trade games back and forth with him.

Around the same time though I was missing the good old days of the NES and the SNES/Mega Drive era, and after what became an almost weekly ritual of staying up late one night a week and getting all 96 levels on Super Mario World with a mate, I started acquiring old games and systems again.

Fortunately this was well before anyone thought that there was value in selling their retro games so I was able to blag most of it for free as they just wanted it shifted. Good luck having that experience now. This lead to many hungover Saturday mornings cranking up the volume on my hi-fi as I played through either Streets of Rage or NES Double Dragon whilst waiting for my local pub to open for lunch.

After University I used my degree and interests at a job in Cambridge, mainly being a Photoshop specialist, before moving to Sheffield and stereotypically ending up in the steel industry. Obviously I could only take so much of that and managed to worm my way into the games industry (still in Sheffield) where I was fortunate enough to work on games for Sega, (new) Atari, Capcom, Konami and Codemasters but jacked it in for the vastly better conditions in the industrial simulation industry , yet still ended up sitting next to someone that hums Super Mario World tunes to me every day.

Anything else of note, you will probably know if you've listened to the show over the last few years, if not, you had better go back through the old episodes.