At the age of 8, while my peers were busy playing marbles in the yard, I was more often glued to a dusty tube TV, clutching a battered PS2 controller. From the wild adventures of GTA: San Andreas to the epic battles of God of War, each game took me through a different world. But none left a mark as strong as Need for Speed: Most Wanted. When I first grabbed the virtual steering wheel of that BMW M3 GTR, my heart pounded—not just because of the police chases or the 200 km/h speeds, but because of the nagging questions: How did the roar of the engine sound so alive? How did the car dent when it hit the curb, or the sky slowly fade from orange to purple at dusk? I was convinced that behind that screen was a secret language that controlled everything.
In high school, my obsession with coding and games began to take on a y-shape. One afternoon, my IT teacher introduced me to a simple programming concept. Suddenly, the rows of numbers and symbols that had initially felt foreign turned into a blueprint for creating another "world." I was no longer just staring at a passive screen; now, I wanted to be its director.
I started spending my breaks in the computer lab, tinkering with the simple code taught in class. The obsession spread to the little things. When my friends complained about boring HTML assignments, I would sneak in CSS to make the background of the page move. My IT teacher even commented, "You're cool, you can do this." I used that as motivation. Slowly, I opened online tutorials about Python, trying to create simple algorithms.
But the road was not always smooth. One time, the code for my HTML project kept erroring. I stayed up all night, trying all the solutions from beginner programmer forums, until I finally realized: I had placed the semicolons wrong. I was tired, but I laughed to myself. It was like speeding around a sharp corner without nitro—sometimes you have to slow down first, fix your position, then accelerate again.
Now, in the midst of preparing for college, that enthusiasm has transformed into ambition. I began to imagine an educational game that combines the tension of the Most Wanted race with the logic of coding—for example, players have to write a simple function to fix a car that breaks down in the middle of the track. That dream is still far away, but every time I see a BMW M3 GTR on the screen, or successfully fix an error in the code, I remember the words of my IT guru: "The digital world is an infinite canvas. You can be the painter."
"The digital world is an infinite canvas. You can be the painter."
- My IT Guru
PS2 with Need for Speed: Most Wanted
HTML & CSS experiments
Python-based game prototype