"It was just a room," he recalls, "and the player had to figure out how to leave it." If the player's text input didn't match any preprogrammed phrases, the game would reply, "I don't know what that means" in German. It was a simple game, but it was a start. Franzke found the experience "incredibly fascinating" — so much so, even, that he knew right then and there that he wanted to make games for a living.

For many game developers — like Franzke, who achieved his dream and now works as a lead programmer at Double Fine Productions — making games is in their blood. It's part of who they are, how they were shaped as an individual. And often it's something they began doing at an early age.

These are the stories of how more than a dozen game developers got their start in the business — of not their first step in professional game making but rather of the childhood passion or hobby that drew their interest years before they reached legal voting or drinking age.

The thrill of learning

Franzke continued making games in BASIC for a few years after that first attempt at a text adventure, then he got an IBM PC with a 256-color monitor. "This was around the time when Myst was huge," he recalls. "I was so blown away by its graphics that I started to learn how to create 3D graphics using POV-Ray. I quickly figured out how to combine primitive shapes — box, sphere, cylinder and so on — into more complex models." Before long, he ran into its limitations and stepped up to a 3D modeling and rendering program called Reflections, which made it possible for him to make more impressive graphics.

Every time he learned a new skill or technique, he experienced a burst of creativity. "I just couldn't stop creating cool things and I loved it," he says. "The feeling of realizing your ideas in the form of a game (or part of a game) was (and is) very addictive."

Myst co-creator and Obduction writer/director Rand Miller learned of this creative thrill at a young age, too. He discovered computer games while he was in junior high when a family acquaintance took him to a computer lab at the local university to show him an IBM mainframe. Miller was instantly hooked by the magic of Lunar Lander, a text-based game in which the player had to decide how much fuel to burn every second in order to safely land a lunar module on the moon's surface.

"Swarms was an interesting leap for me, game mechanics-wise," he says. "It was the first time I added in a temporal element. There were various 'defenses' you could attempt to combat the spread of the bees. Some of them worked immediately but with only a small effect. But time-based defenses might take four or five 'turns' to see if they would work. The idea was to spread various defenses around to try to save as many lives as possible — but the 'time' element added an extra piece to juggle that worked really well. The complexity of the mechanics — effect, timing, collateral damage — made game balancing something I had to teach myself about."

Swarms was also Miller's first taste of professional game development. He was still in high school when it was accepted into Creative Computing magazine, its BASIC code reproduced in full in the May-June 1977 issue — alongside a note from Miller praising the Albuquerque public school system for its student-accessible use of a DEC-10 computer system, which he'd benefitted from in developing his game.

"This was a revelation," he continues, "and I realized that computers allowed you to create worlds with your own rules. I was immediately hooked."

He was never able to get enough time on the computer, he says, so he started sneaking back into the school after hours via a window he unlocked before leaving. This allowed him to work late into the night — sometimes until midnight — on his own little games in BASIC. "The screen was 60 characters across and something like 12 or 15 lines high, and it was just a green CRT with nothing but ASCII text," he says. "So I made a tank that looked something like (###)== and then an enemy tank facing your direction on the same line 50 spaces away. You'd then type in a number between one and 1,000 and the game would print out the line with the two tanks again but show where your shell hit. Then the enemy take would take a shot at you."

"You kept taking turns until one of the tanks was hit and destroyed. Believe it or not, this game was a big hit with all my friends, and it was actually quite tense!"

Another of his games, Space War, was a two-dimensional space battle for a teletype display that he modelled after the Star Trek mainframe games. Every turn, the playfield had to be reprinted on paper. "I was quite proud of the AI in that game," he recalls. "Most players could not beat the AI-controlled spaceship."

Eventually the school discovered what he'd been doing when a cleaner walked in on him coding. The next day he was called into the principal's office. They had an inch-high stack of print-outs of the code from his games. His work was so impressive that they agreed to overlook his transgressions if he would help the computer teacher whenever needed and start coming in the front door for his extracurricular programming — using a key the principal slid across the desk.

Falling into games, then falling out

She'd plan out a branching narrative and draw blueprint maps of locations, then use these notes as a reference point as she wrote if-then conditional statements to cater to player decisions. Chen can't recall the exact details of her first game, but she says the protagonist was a young boy. He'd been kidnapped or otherwise dropped unexpectedly into a medieval fantasy society. "After every block of text, the player could select one out of five choices to progress the story," she says.

"What I remember the most is that I had my brother play it through, and when he kept on getting bad endings, he didn't want to play anymore," Chen continues. "I realized that the game I made was too harsh because it was very easy for a player to fall into clever traps and get bad endings. So, the next time around, I began to think more about improving the player's experience."

Dyad developer Shawn McGrath also dropped out of game making for a few years after starting early. His problem was less one of passion, however, and more of the difficulty of finding reliable collaborators when you're developing games as a hobby. "I stopped [at] around 16 because I couldn't draw and I couldn't get graphics into the game," he told Gamasutra in 2011. In a new interview, he says that he'd started out in competitive chess when he was four. He was exposed to game design as a discipline in second grade. He'd stay back from school a couple of times a week to play and discuss a Viking-themed, grid-based, chess-like game his teacher's boyfriend was developing.

McGrath later attempted to design his own chess-like games, but playing Tetris held more sway with him than game making (even as it planted a seed in his head that he could maybe be a game developer when he grew up). It wasn't until he was 12 or 13, when he started learning programming, that he really got into development as a hobby. "I would just try to clone games that I was playing at the time — top-down shooters and maze games, mostly," he recalls. "Nothing crazy. They were all kinda shit."

Other developers, like SpyParty creator Chris Hecker, who previously designed and programmed the procedural animation system in Spore, never have that falling-out phase. They start early and never look back.

"The first game I wrote — or tried to write — was a clone of Tempest, my favorite game at the time, on Commodore 64," Hecker says. This was around 1982 or '83 when he would have been about 12 years old. "I had this program called SuperBASIC or UltraBASIC or something like that, and it added all kinds of nifty sprite routines to regular C64 BASIC." He likens it to a kind of game engine, like a Unity or Unreal for the Commodore 64. Except bad.

He decided to take matters into his own hands after that. He set about teaching himself Assembly language, which is just one thin layer of abstraction above machine code (the language that a computer's CPU uses to actually execute tasks). "I guess I never looked back, since SpyParty is using all custom code and not an existing game engine," he says, "and people think I'm crazy for it — maybe it's just childhood trauma at its core!"

Starting young

While it's common for developers to first dabble in game making during their teenage years, some start much younger — nudged into it by an older sibling or a parent with an eye for technology. Spelltower and Typeshift creator Zach Gage credits his first step into game development to his mom, who bought the family's first computer, a Macintosh LC, in the early 1990s while he was still in kindergarten. "I was only allowed to buy two computer games," he says. "I bought Prince of Persia and Lemmings, and then when I got tired of those, I ended up just spending most of my time playing with Kid Pix and sort of using the stamps to design games."

Sometimes the brothers worked on different things — Zach wrote adventures in the style of Infocom's games and Sierra's Quest series with his friends, while Tarn wrote "a bunch of strange ASCII animations and generators." But all of their larger projects — the ones that seemed really interesting — involved both brothers.

There was also an arcade-style space game with ships that had chunks of pixels blowing off them, along with a game called Cybercop that neither brother remembers but Adams suggests was likely less a "clean up the streets" cop game "so much as slowly degrade and get wounded and die a horrible death within five minutes" game. And they found backups of some 400 or so others they made in BASIC before they moved up to C in high school. "We don't even remember making half of them," Adams says. He also notes that some of these games have corrupted source code files because of frequent computer crashes — a notable example being Tarn's ASCII monster designer, almost all of which was overwritten during a computer crash by a memory dump of the code for an interactive fiction game that Zach had just started.

Levelling up to better games and tools

For all of its ease of use and versatility, there was only so much BASIC could do before it would run out of memory or crumble under the complexity of a sophisticated and ambitious game design. Sooner or later, these kids would inevitably have to move on to something more advanced in order to continue learning and growing as game makers.

When they entered high school, Tarn and Zach remade Dragslay in C — now with a world map, goblin tribes and goblins that could mock the player for past failures. That led directly into Slaves of Armok: God of Blood, an isometric-view fantasy game they worked on just before Tarn started graduate school, which also got remade as their skills improved. Both versions of both games would later provide the groundwork for Dwarf Fortress, which added Civilization- and SimEarth-style procedural world generation to their fantasy and role-playing systems. "It became pretty clear there was a lot of potential, revisiting previously played worlds and so on," says Adams, "so we always felt compelled to work on it."

With Cocoa, Gage remembers he made a space game called Escape from Pluto, which he put up for sale through a website. "I sold one copy," he laughs. "I was very psyched." Another game, which turned out to be too ambitious for Cocoa to handle, had a battle engine similar to Dragon Quest's.

He also contributed to a book about Cocoa, which led to a magazine article for which Gage had to do a photo shoot. "They put a bunch of wires on my face and I totally hated it," he recalls. "It made me very early on kind of be like, 'Oh man, I don't ever want to be famous. I don't want to be near magazines where I have to do photo shoots.'" But all the same, it encouraged him to keep going with games. It showed that people other than his mom and friends cared about what he was making — that there were people around the world to whom his games mattered.

Gage wasn't the only one to get attention thrust upon him for early achievement in games. Interplay founding member Rebecca Heineman was a teenager lying about her age when she started working as a professional programmer on Atari 2600 games and when she won the National Space Invaders Championship in 1980. Naughty Dog co-founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin were 15 years old when they sold a skiing game to the company Baudville for $250 and 16 when their graphic adventure Dream Zone sold 10,000 copies. (They started contracting for Electronic Arts the following year.)

Now both legends of the industry, they've helped their 12-year-old son Donovan make and release his first game, Gunman Taco Truck, on Steam, to what has so far been a positive reception.

Game design is a skill and a discipline, but also a mindset — a way of thinking about rules and systems that favors engagement over order. Often a passion for game development emerges side by side with an intrinsic understanding of this idea — that games combine audio, visuals, touch, rules and systems of interaction into an enjoyable experience. Eyram Tawia gained this understanding quickly as he wrapped his head around the concepts of code. He found programming through a book, the Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter, that he read at age 13. Now the co-founder and CEO of Ghana and Kenya-based games and comics company Leti Arts, Tawia recalls well how he stumbled at this early stage of technology discovery. Walter's book had included information on programming in the languages C, Logo, Pascal and QBASIC, but only the last of these loaded when he tried to use them from a DOS prompt. "I had no idea software needed to be installed before run," he explains.

"My first game was a semi text-based game for my comic book 'Sword of Sygos'," Tawia continues. "This game had a green map with a smiley that represented you and a dark-green box that represented where the sword was. You navigated by responding to prompts as to which direction to move (north, south, east, west) and you'd randomly meet enemies, which you'd fight by responding to prompts to attack or block. It was fun and spanned about 10 pages of code."

He then joined forces with two of his friends, whereupon they collaborated on lots more games. They made racing games, top-down shooters, fighting games, betting games, maze games, financial literacy games, 3D flight simulators "and a whole lot more" — all in QBASIC.

He soon developed a fondness for board games. In particular, ones with colorful plastic counters and props, and also 3M's Bookshelf Games series — which packaged family-friendly board and card games in boxes made to resemble leather-bound books. At 10 years old, he saw the film "Sink the Bismarck!" — a dramatic retelling of the events leading up to the destruction of the famous German battleship during World War II. "Not long after," he recalls, "I made a game out of cardboard, marbles and pennies to play with a friend." Much of the cardboard formed a mock version of the ship with different point values assigned to each of the compartments. A cardboard torpedo bomber had a slot through which a penny could be rolled, mimicking the flight of a torpedo, as the plane approached the Bismarck. To keep it challenging, players had to release the penny at least three feet from the ship.

"When I found it was boring to wait until the other player had done taking their turn," Falstein notes, "I added a defensive component: The second player could defend the Bismarck by rolling a marble perpendicular to the path of the penny to try to knock it out of the way."

Years later, at age 16, Falstein made a board game that he recalls had startling similarities to the popular Nintendo DS turn-based strategy title Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The board was a map of four countries, one in each corner, their territories colored black, red, blue and green, respectively, with a large sea around an island in the center. Players could build factories that would produce military units, such as infantry, tanks, artillery, planes and ships, and vehicles had ammunition and fuel counters that depleted as they fired or moved. And there were spots on the map that could be mined for uranium, which enabled the production of nuclear bombs.

"You could win by capturing or destroying the enemy capitol or eliminating all forces," Falstein says. "I don't recall playing an entire game with friends, as it took many hours to complete, but mostly played all four sides on my own, which seems pretty sad in retrospect." (Falstein also notes with some regret that the board is long gone — he threw it out in 1995 while helping his dad move from his house and didn't think to photograph it first.)

One time he tried to make a space game. "Each of the players was the captain of a star ship," he recalls. "They sat in different rooms from each other in big, padded swivel chairs, getting reports and issuing commands, James Kirk-style. In yet another room, I had a great big map on cardboard the size of a large kitchen table, where I could track the ships and space torpedoes and stuff like that."

Grossman went from room to room telling players what their sensors were picking up. It was a miserable experience, he says. The fight mechanics were "the opposite of fun" and the captains spent much of their time sitting alone in separate rooms struggling to locate one another's ships.

Grossman briefly dabbled in Commodore 64 game development, too. "I got a little Coca-Cola can bouncing around the screen," he recalls, "and you could drive it with a joystick, or maybe arrow keys, and I don't think I got much farther than that." The project didn't hold his interest long enough to finish.

Looking back

Grossman is quick to downplay the significance of his childhood game-making efforts. "The lessons learned I would have learned quickly no matter when I started designing," he argues. But he concedes that at least some of the ways in which he thinks about games — his personality as a game designer — were already present at this early stage. "How they got there, I have no idea," he says.

Noah Falstein, by contrast, believes that the time spent crafting his own games during his childhood were critical to preparing him for a career in the business. He singles out the large military game, in particular, for helping him develop an understanding of how to make games fun (or boring) and how to iterate on or modify rules and concepts to see if they improve the experience. It's not something he thought about consciously at the time — "I didn't analyze motivation or consider core loops at 10 in the 1960s," he notes — but these fun experiments were at the root of a lifelong fascination with game design.

Sande Chen similarly sees her early experiences writing text adventures as foundational on her path as a professional. "I took to branching narrative and nonlinearity easily because it was already in my way of thinking," she says. Oliver Franzke makes much the same assertion. By teaching himself programming and 3D graphics, he was able to specialize in computer graphics at college and then to work in the industry as a tools and graphics programmer. And by being able to speak the "language" of artists, after all the art he made for his own games, he found that he could bridge the gulf between departments at professional studios.

For Tarn and Zach Adams, there is no clear division between making games as kids and adults. "We've been going more or less nonstop since we started, so it just feels like one long arc," explains Tarn. "It's hard to say how much it matters in terms of developing good intuition and so on compared to how it would be if we had started in, say, our twenties. [But] it certainly feels like a lot of practice."

That practice was invaluable to Eyram Tawia, too, who says the key for him is to hold on to the passion he had for programming and games as a kid and to remember how special it felt at the time.