Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

Jay Tholen, lead developer of Hypnospace Outlaw and Dropsy, recounts in an autobiographical essay how he began making games as a child in the early 2000s. After years of begging, his parents took out a bank loan in 1997 to buy a Packard Bell Multimedia PC from Best Buy, though internet access followed about two years later. Diagnosed at 11 with ADHD Primarily Inattentive, Tholen struggled through his first year of middle school, abandoning homework and classwork as his focus shifted to the 1996 no-programming 2D development suite The Games Factory, developed by Europress (later Clickteam) as the successor to Klik n Play. The essay traces how that early obsession with PCs and the web led to his later career in game design.