Tools, technology, and games — built for real people.

There was a Commodore 64 in my house, then a 486 and a Super Nintendo. I knew the specific sound the drive made. I knew that if I got my homework done fast enough I could get an hour on it before dinner.

I played a lot of things, but my favorites were always strategy and simulation. Battletech. VGA Planets. Civilization. SimAnt, SimCity, SimEarth. If a game let me set something in motion and then watch what my decisions did to it over a hundred turns, I was in. Other kids wanted to beat Mario. I wanted to see what happened to the anthill in year three.

Then I found Koei. Genghis Khan II, Nobunaga's Ambition, and above all Romance of the Three Kingdoms — still one of the most quietly radical things anyone was shipping on 16-bit systems. Because Koei let you make an officer. You built a person, dropped them into a real historical map, and watched them live a life inside it. They served. They rose. They betrayed somebody or got betrayed. They died in a duel in a province they had spent forty turns trying to hold.

Most games handed you a character. Koei handed you a slot in history.

Running alongside that was a second stack of games I never thought of as a separate category — Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, which is the reason I can still find Papua New Guinea on a map, and one of those Apple Mac games where you learned math by loading cargo and moving it across the world. Nobody had to sell me on educational games. I was already inside one, voluntarily, after school.

That turned into a career. I taught science, moved into administration, and now run a department that builds engaging experiences for students — mentors, internships, industry tours. I also know what good software can do. History is the best strategy game ever written, and we mostly hand it to kids as a list of dates.

The other thing those machines gave me was VGA Planets, crowded around one screen with the friends I grew up with. We scattered across both coasts. Game night now has to survive six calendars, several jobs, and other people's bedtimes — so we drifted toward asynchronous games. That isn't a compromise. It's the only format that respects the lives adults actually have.

There are almost none of them at the depth we wanted. That's the gap I've been staring at for years.