You may or may not recall, but in a previous post I talked about a concept that Paul Barnett made me aware of – and that is that every game designer (and gamer) over the age of thirty has their Golden Age of gaming.  It was that time of their lives when computer games or video game were who we were.  And those games that we played shaped forever our perceptions about what we loved in games, and the kinds of games we were passionate about.  The defined, to a large extent, what we considered fun.   For myself, my Golden Age, which I remember with misty-tinged full-bloom recollections, occurred at about a time when what we back then referred to as the CRPGs were at their height.  So my fondest computer games were the Ultima series, the Gold Box series of SSI games, the Eye of the Beholder games by Westwood, and of course Joe Ybarra’s classic Bards Tale games.  Eventually, these games came to include Baldur’s Gate & Icewind Dale, and my mind still balks at the thought of the dozens upon dozens of hours I spent hunkered down in front of a computer screen in the cold hours of predawn navigating my individually created and hand-picked crew of six through the deepest caverns of a land that never existed.

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