First post... treads carefully...

I thought I'd try and give a blog a whirl, despite having almost 20yrs of great material behind me. It's a funny thing for me since much of the cool stuff I'd like to talk about, I can't - so I guess I'll probably be restricted to ramblings about where I've been and generalisations about what I've got up to.

Part of me wanting to start a blog was to talk about changes to my life, primarily due to finding out that I'd been diagnosed with Type2 Diabetes in the early part of 2006.

Initially it came as a bit of a shock, but I was determined not to let it hinder me and in fact, chose to take it positively (as much as you can) and use it to get my health in order, which had suffered, to say the least given my fun-filled (and hard-working, honest) exploits in the video games industry.

All of a sudden I was approaching 40 (I'm 39, currently), was way overweight, totally unfit and toboot had a chronic disease that wasn't going to go away. I had to do something about it and one of those things was to stop doing something I'd become rather good at - drinking copious amounts of beer. I'll pick up on how thats doing in a later post.

Work wise, things have been pretty busy around the Team17 office for a little while, given we've had two PSP games (and one DS one) recently released and doing well in the gaming charts (two in the top four, no less). It's been a little while since we have had quite so much success and I'd like to think that this is due to the amount of hard work by all the team in the studio.There's also a ton of stuff going on in the background which is all really exciting, but nothing I can talk about right now.

A couple of weeks ago, myself and John Dennis (JD) went to San Jose/San Francisco for the Game Developer's Conference and also the publisher-developer "speed dating" event called Game Connection. The week was massively successful from a commercial opportunities and social enjoyment point of view - but then most of the trips usually are!

Home wise and my two boys are growing up very fast, Jack is almost nine and Harry almost 5. It's incredible how fast life flies by once you have kids in the house... it's as if they age and you don't, most odd. Still, I have a lot of fun spoiling them rotten with games and gadgets.