So many things have happened in the last few years that it's too much to put into a single blog post. Let's start with some general questions then. Where did Mel come from? What does she know about gaming? Why write about video games now? Well, my name is really Mel, er, Melissa, but everyone calls me Mel. I'm originally from San Diego California. Due to being a broke college student, I chose to move to Phoenix Arizona so that I could have all the comforts of home, with the exception of the beaches which I miss dearly, at an affordable price. Somehow after I moved to Arizona (and went through the obligatory “I need to be in a rock band and drink copious amounts of booze-a-hol” phase. Everyone has one of those, right?) I cleaned up my act and managed to land a cozy little office job. An office job where I had the most awesome boss ever. In between busy work times, when the office was slow, I was allowed to play video games.
Now, I've always been a big fan of video games in general. I can still remember the first time I ever played a console game. I was about 4 years old, and seeing an nes for the first time. I was like, “what's a maw-ee-oh?”. Picked it up and played and the rest was history...well, sort of. Video games and consoles had come and gone throughout various points in my life. Growing up I had the Nes, snes, genesis, sega cd, n64, playstations 1 &2 and too many games to mention here. Sometimes I would play for weeks on end, sometimes I would take month long breaks, just to come back and love games even more than before. It was sometime in elementary school that I got the crazy idea that I would become a journalist for Nintendo Power Magazine. No seriously, that's what I really REALLY wanted to do, I was planning on moving and everything. I had this crazy idea in my head all the way up until the time that I hit high school, I even managed to get into honors English classes...only to be kicked out because I didn't do the homework required over the summer break. Homework? During summer break? Puh-lease, I was busy...playing video games. Sometime between that incident and college, my goals changed. I don't quite remember all the details, but it had something to do with performing arts, but that's a story for another time. I ended up majoring in human psychology which has nothing to do with what I do today (thanks college!).
I think I got off track there for a moment. Back to my job today. Sure, I can play video games where I work, just that should be enough to satisfy most gamers, but not me. No, I got tired of the classics, I decided to start playing a bunch of old obscure games on emulators for different systems. Even that wasn't enough. After a while I started researching some of the games that I was playing, simply out of curiosity. Turns out, not much was known about said games. I was shocked to say the least. Everything from unknown release dates, to development teams that don't even exist anymore. I started playing these particular games more in-depth and went on a writing spree that lasted a good couple of months. Then I had a pile of papers with a bunch of information that no one assumingly gave two shits about. I decided that I would share this information with the internet whether they liked it or not.
I wasn't sure how I was going to make the series, would it just be game play and text? Commentary perhaps? At one point when throwing around ideas, I thought that a sketch comedy series with informational bits thrown in would be a good idea. There was even a meeting with a few other people that were interested in that idea, but it didn't really go anywhere. After a while, I decided to just make the series on my own. I already had previous video and audio editing experience, so that wasn't a big deal. Then there was the stupid stupid hurdle of me not liking the sound of my own voice recorded. Got over that one really fast. After finishing the first few episodes, I set up the facebook, the twitter, the youtube, the other accounts that I can't remember right now, and got to spreading the word. Shortly after, I received the invitation to post my content spacemonkeymafiastudios.com. And a few months later, that's where we are today.
I'd like to end this post with a sort of mission statement. What is the meaning of this series that I work on? Well, I'm not getting payed so that's not it. I do enjoy playing video games, and writing/making videos about video games, but it's more for the games themselves. Many of these games and the people that have put time, energy, and resources into these games, were never heard of and just forgotten about. This is for them, and anyone who has a desire to make something whether it gets noticed or not. If you spend time doing something that you love, just for the love of it, that's awesome, and you deserve a high-five.
