TORIN DENNISTON

To say that games have shaped my life would be an understatement.

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My earliest memories of games are of my brother and me on a bench, playing a DOS-based game where you avoided danger by spelling words correctly. Next came Number Crunchers, a maze-like iMac game only conquerable if the player mastered basic math skills. While these games were my beginning, the real turn in the road for me came when I discovered Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, HALO: Combat Evolved, and Warcraft III.

 

For the first time in my experience, these games offered the most complex story elements of my favorite childhood books. Each had deep characters, moral conflict, and an added bonus: superb voice acting that brought the characters to life. I found myself becoming emotionally invested in these characters in a way made all the more powerful by the fact that I was these characters. I made the choices. I lived their struggles. Their stories shaped me over time, and as multiplayer elements were added to each of the universes over the years, they shaped my friends as well.

 

Where I differ from my friends, though, is that I saw the changes in myself and in them at an early age. I saw how the games we immersed ourselves in improved our lives and our relationships with each other. Sitting in a cramped room with my closest friends, I felt a deep desire to help future gamers make memories like the ones we had.

 

Many things have happened in my life since I first felt that urge as a teenager. I’ve been a public relations manager, an IT consultant and a Facebook analyst. But to this day, any time I see a roaring crowd at a game convention, I feel a surge of adrenaline. Not only because I am as excited about the games on display as everyone else, but because I have a moment where I pause. A moment where I think, “I’d love to make those people as happy as they are right now. "

 

Inspired by the games that set me down this path, I want to share this art that has changed my life.