Super Mario Bros supercharged my interest in appdev and eventually indie game making. My first computer was an IBM PCjr with various games on floppy, a cartrid

Super Mario Bros supercharged my interest in appdev and eventually indie game making. My first computer was an IBM PCjr with various games on floppy, a cartridge BASIC, and a spiral-bound programming manual. Not sure how old I was, old enough to read, but as I was flipping through the manual one day, I noticed one of my brothers had scribbled words next to the colors in the section on drawing to the screen: brown had "block", cyan had "sky", etc. It was a mapping of Super Mario Bros tiles to BASIC colors. It was at that point that I realized I didn't just have to play games made by others. I could make my own! A couple decades later and I'm still making them. I like to think my skills have improved some since those days :)