It all began in January 2014 when I decided that I could afford to spend some money on a Video Game (something which I had not done for a very long time).
I had already seen details about a game called ASA: A Space Adventure on one of the game-sites that I would view from time to time, and the game seemed to be
very interesting to me. It appeared to be based around some ideas from 2001 A Space Odyssey which was one of my favourite films of all time.
It was also priced reasonably, so I took the plunge and ordered it through Gamersgate (an on-line retailer that I had used before). Following download
(which seemed to take longer than usual on the rather erratic internet that I had at the time), I extracted everything and went ahead with the installation,
or the failed initialisation of the installation, which is what actually happened.
To cut a long story short, after several attempts, re-downloads, and a considerable amount of frustration, I found an email address to contact.
The address was that of the developer (Simon Mesnard) who appeared to be based in France. After a couple of emails where Simon had asked me to try different options
which had not worked (at this stage I believe I was the only person experiencing problems), Simon advised me that other people were experiencing the same issue,
and sent me a free copy from another site.
Over the next few weeks Simon and I developed a mutual respect and found we had similar interests. I helped identify what the issue was with the version that I had
downloaded by comparing all of the files and building a working copy of the original bad version. This enabled Simon to modify the versions on the website that everyone
was having trouble with. To say thank you, Simon gave me access to an unreleased preview of the next game that he was working on
Following on from this, we began to discuss various ideas, particularly in relation to Space and Time and I sent him a copy of the Tesseract gif which is on the first page of this site. This began what was to become a really fascinating period for me (which is still ongoing) and led to my involvement with a group of independent video game developers and my becoming the manager of TheIcehouse Collective (of which more later).