Meet the Staff: Greg [Watchful]

Greg has been here for a long time. We’re not sure why he’s still here, but I think it might have something to do with being stuck inside the tags section of WordPress… we just can’t get him out! Well, he managed to grab a hold of the Meet the Staff tag and wouldn’t let go until we interviewed him! People, eh?*[drop2]

Name: Greg Aldridge

Age: 36.95 years and counting…

Birthplace: Portsmouth, UK

Living now: Peterborough, UK

Gamerscore/Trophy Level: 5872/14 (56%)

Random fact about yourself: I once won a talent contest with a stand-up comedy routine.

Q: What got you into gaming in the first place, Greg?

A: Getting a secondhand Binatone TV Master console at the start of the 80s.  It may have only been Pong, with three additional variations on the same theme plus two light gun games but it sparked my interest in gaming.  Next step was the Speccy (the C64 didn’t exist for me unless it happened to have Up Periscope! loaded) before I switched to PC gaming in 1988.  Keeping a succession of PCs upgraded to the highest level of performance became too much of drain on money at Uni so I bought a PlayStation when they launched and it’s been predominantly console gaming since.  In the past year or so I’ve got back into PC gaming somewhat though truth be told I never really stopped playing the Civilisation series.

Q: As well as gaming, you enjoy making up numbers and statistics for articles… aside from these, do you have any hobbies?

A: I don’t make up the numbers, I leave that for all the so-called analysts.  :-)  I like to get out and about either on foot or my bike. I’m particularly fond of wandering around the Peak District as that’s an easy day trip from home so I can get up there and enjoy and hills (and tearooms) even when I don’t have much free time.  It’s nice and flat around Peterborough so it’s trivially easy to cycle 20-30 miles on a Sunday morning before getting down to whatever needs to be done.

Q: Being around for 36.95 years, you must have had some embarrassing moments along the way. Tell us one… or two!

A: You can have one, which is more than most people get.  There exists somewhere video of me on stage in drag having been press-ganged into filling in for someone else at short notice and being unable to talk my way out of it.  Parading around on stage in a dress, blonde wig, make-up and high heels in front of hundreds of people was not my finest hour.  It was only after the event that I found out one of my ‘friends’ in the audience had videoed it…

Q: What do you do for a living to fund your gaming?

A: I have been a software engineer for the roughly 14.82 years since graduating from the University of Hertfordshire (it was still Hatfield Polytechnic when I first went there) working on everything from the kind of things I can’t tell you about without having to kill you afterwards (I got to visit some amazing ‘trade shows’ during those years and witness product demonstrations to die for) through mobile phone infrastructure to the industrial printers that print the pink lion and date code on your U.K. eggs.

Q: Do you have any good nicknames that we should be… Watchful… of?

A: There’s one that was a playground favourite (for everyone else) for a while.  Being one of those seemingly rare kids who actually quite liked learning at school I was always considered something of a brain-box or swot (see definition here). That and having a high forehead with short curly hair combined with a certain series of TV adverts led to me being stuck with the nickname Tefal for several years.

Q: Does your family join in with gaming or is it just you?

A: My parents never really ‘got’ gaming, though Mum is addicted to Solitaire despite years of trying to get her to play a proper game. My sister and her boyfriend enjoy playing the Lego games together and she’ll spectate while he plays the more story-based games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

Q: You’ve been here for a long, long time, but do you remember how you found TSA in the first place?

A: It was a link on the ‘unofficial’ PS3 blog Threespeech that first landed me on TSA’s front page.  I was just a ‘lurker’ for about a year before finally signing up to dip my toe in the murky waters of the forums.  Within a few months I was hosting a couple of Burnout Paradise meets every week and after another couple of months circumstances led to Alex inviting me to help out with the news coverage; something he’s probably regretted ever since.

Q: What’s your favourite game and why?

A: For a single game it would have to be Elite which I used to play for hours on my best friend’s BBC Micro before I was able to get it for my Speccy and then in its Elite Plus incarnation on the PC.  Filled polygons!  If I was to ever discover how many hundreds of hours I spent on Elite and how many commanders I raised from Harmless to Elite I would probably scare myself.  The freedom it gave you with a whole galaxy to explore and being able to choose the way you did it just blew my young mind.  Whether you only ever fired in defence of your valuable cargo or would flit from system to system bouncing your military laser off the local space station just to draw the police Vipers out for a spot of target practice, it was that sense of choice that made it stand out for me.

I must also give an honourable mention to Sid Meier’s Civilisation series which over the last twenty years has easily consumed more of my time than any other games ever have.  Just. One. More. Turn.

Q: Are there any final things you’d like to let the readers know?

A: No, I’ve told them far too much already.  If I say anything else I’ll have to include some graphs like estimated hours of Elite played per year or plotting the Speccy and C64 on a graph of awesome which would just upset the (misguided) Commodore fans.  :-)

*This is probably not true, Greg is safe and not being kept locked up behind the scenes of TSA.

So there we go, that’s the end of another week of Meet the Staff. Maybe you’ll see Greg frantically reciting numbers whilst cycling around the Peak District one day, you might even see one of his articles pop up soon. Well you don’t need to worry any more, as you know a lot more about him now and know that he isn’t actually just software for making graphs and numbers up (yes, Greg, you make them up… no matter how much blame you want to put on these apparent analysts.)