The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript

We are twin brothers who were born right at the beginning of the 1970s just about the same time the first video games were being created and marketed by people like Nolan Bushnell at Atari and Ralph Baer for Magnavox. While we did not know of these video game advances at the time, something exciting was obviously in the air in those years. As far back as we can remember, we have wanted to make our own games. We grew up just like most suburban kids of the 1970s—riding bikes, playing guns and ditch ’em at the school yard, and staying out all day only to come home when the street lights came on. There was never a lot of extra money in the household, so that meant we had to find creative ways to entertain ourselves. At a very early age, we started designing games to help fill the days. First came sports contests. We spent many days conceiving two-player versions of nearly every sport imaginable on the 100-foot driveway that adorned our 1950s tract house. Not too long after, we graduated to experimenting with our dad’s surplus batteries, wires, lights, motors, and potentiometers; we were trying to make anything electronic. Through trial and error, we made electric gadgets with blinking lights, switches, and running motors, and even crude pinball machines. Soon, almost any household item had the potential to become an interactive toy or game.