So. Who am I? I'm Ryan Bloom. I've been surrounded by videogames all my life. As far back as I can remember my family owned an Atari 2600, and we just kept on gaming from then onwards. Sonic the Hedgehog changed my life in a way, because it was through him I began drawing (by doodling Sonic all day long), giving way to my artistic skill. It was also because of Sonic the Hedgehog I began trying to make games using Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion line of software. Sonic the Hedgehog also lead me to write an article entitled, "Dissecting a Hedgehog: An In-depth analysis of Sonic the Hedgehog", which ended up being published in the first issue of the quarterly magazine, The Gamer's Quarter. I was offered a (non-paying) job at TGQ, but I turned it down because I did not feel smart enough.
Some would tell me I am Internet Famous, and for the most part I did not believe them, until August 2005 when a game I made - Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX - exploded in popularity. For starters, it was featured on G4TV's Attack of the Show. It quickly showed up on Digg and the like shortly afterwards. Since then, it's been featured in numerous publications - most recently Games For Windows Magazine's 2007 Freeware Games feature. It is mirrored on so many websites by now that I don't actually know how many downloads it's even had anymore. Going by Gamer's Hell, the site I originally posted it on, it's had 438,147 downloads as of writing this, still averaging nearly 2,000 downloads per day. That still floors me to this day. I'm actually a little embarrassed of the game because the amount of effort I put in to it at the beginning was pretty nominal, which lead to serious problems in the game's control by the time I actually got around to finishing the game. I am the first person to admit it has serious problems with controls and difficulty balancing.
Roughly one year later, I won Gametrailers.com's "Siblings of the Binary and Famous" User Movie contest, the prize being $1000 in EB Games Gift Cards. I won with a short I animated entitled, "The Third Mario Brother". Since then I've been on a roll, entering Art Contests and the like, feeding my gaming fix through my own creative talents.
Currently, I am bouncing between three projects at once.
- Castlevania: Ballad of Autumn, a very belated Halloween 2006 project and my most recent work.
- Shadow of Chaos, a game that parodies Shadow the Hedgehog. One of the few games I actually enlisted the help of outsiders to work on it with me.
- Sonic: The Fated Hour, a game I've spent years planning, but never doing.
I also, like any self-respecting gaming dork, write reviews to amuse myself with from time to time. There are times when I've tried to amp it up a little bit and, say, get myself an interview with somebody important in the gaming industry, but either that peters out or I wuss out.
So yeah. That's me. Who knows, maybe I will post here more often. Probably won't, though...
