I knew from the age of 8 that I wanted to work in the gaming industry. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was my awakening to that. It was a landmark moment in my life, one I don’t take for granted because I know a lot of people find out way later in life who they are and what they’re meant to do. Not me. When I started reading EGM and Gamepro, it hit me that people actually write articles about games for a living. And that was the beginning of my journey to VICE.
So everything I did from that point on was with the goal of getting into the gaming industry in some capacity. Whether I was making the games or writing about them, I needed to make it there. I went to college for a degree in Computer Science, it felt like the right path. Except for the fact that I hated math because someone was always telling me that my method for getting an answer was wrong, despite getting the answer.
I talked about losing my Grandmother in a previous piece so I won’t go too much into detail there. But it destroyed me, and I almost flunked out of school. Thanks to some help from my mother, who worked at the school, and the financial aid department, I was able to stick around. It was at this point in 2010 that I changed my major to English. I’ve been reading since I was 2, and writing was always something that came easy to me. I took one class a semester until I could get my mind right.
Gateway to gaming
In 2013, I connected with a group of people who would become one of my closest friends, The Cade Gang. Jerz was the origin point for the crew and he became like a brother to me. He started OurcadeGames, a site dedicated to writing about games. And this was the point where it hit me, you could just do this shit. So I asked him to let me in on it. And we did some pretty cool work. I had a few articles I was really proud of there.
After 2015, as we slowed down with OurcadeGames, I linked up with DefineARevolution and that crew became like family as well. I started writing about games, music, movies and sports with them. It wasn’t until 2022 that things would really get going for me though. But even with that positive movement, one of the worst moments of my life would come.
In 2022, my childhood friend Kendall decided to start Eclipse Theory and asked me to get it off the ground with him. And we did pretty good. We even managed to get a podcast going. But the most impactful thing that happened was a 2023 review I did for What Lies in the Multiverse, a platform puzzler I’ve mentioned here. That article did more for me than I could have ever hoped.
a fire lit
The response I got from the developer of What Lies in the Multiverse was so incredible and heartfelt that it made me feel like I could actually do this for real. I saw my words used in key art and my review score used in an accolades trailer. At that point, I made the decision to pursue this with everything I had. I got on LinkedIn and just started posting about my journey into gaming. It resonated with people to the point that in 2024, I was able to get a position as a Marketing Content Creator at Untold Tales. Maciej Laczny, the CEO of Untold, and I had been messaging on and off for about a year.
I was always impressed by the fact that he remembered me each time and genuinely wanted to help me get my foot in the door. So when he reached out to offer me that part-time position with them, I jumped on it. And I’ll forever be grateful to Maciej, Robert and the entire Untold team for their help. While I was doing that, I also took a writer position with The Punished Backlog.
That’s where I met the chaos agent running this whole outfit, Dwayne. We didn’t have a ton of interactions in the discord but we did find out that we don’t live too far from each other. My time with TPB was pretty cool. But doing that, Eclipse Theory, Untold Tales and my day job all at the same time while helping raise a kid was burning me out to a degree that I didn’t fully understand.
Dark times
I guess this would be the part where I throw up one of those trigger warnings for suicide ideation. Because on September 11th, 2023, I almost ended my life on the way to work. I was fed up with my day job and so many other things and feeling burnt out to the point that I was losing it. Fortunately, I didn’t. And I took my ass to therapy a month later. I’ve been going ever since. It’s helped a great deal.
That leads to September 2024, when I hopped on LinkedIn and saw Dwayne on there. I shot him a connection request because it had been a while since we spoke and he immediately remembered me and then said the words that flipped all this shit on its head: “Are you still looking for work?” At this point, I had been in the middle of a job search that was coming up dry, I needed to get out of that bank. I also had no idea that he had been reading any of my articles at TPB, but he loved my work and thought I’d be a great fit here.
A month later I signed my contract to write here at VICE. And I’ve loved every second of it, even when I spent the first few months doing this while working at that bank. Every article has felt more a piece of me than anything else. Because the fact of the matter is, I worked really damn hard to get to this point. You can’t pull this off without a significant level of motivation. I put 8 year old me on my back. And I stumbled a few times, but always kept going. I can actually look up now and say that I get paid to doing something I love with every fiber of my being. And I’m just getting started.
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