Ryzom isn't the first game I've worked on, although it is the first thing I've actually developed for the public. I started playing with scripts when I was 8 or 9, which my friends and I would snag out of magazines. They were few and far between though, because it was early 80's and the PC was still very young, but we tracked down articles with lines of code written by the most passionate people. My friends and I lived in the country, so there wasn't much to do until video games arrived, and when they did, it was a new dawn of entertainment for us. We would sit around with our computers and share games. At some point we fell into playing pen and paper role-playing games, which was a nice contrast to the pc games, since we had no audio or visual support but could essentially take ourselves anywhere we wanted in the scope of the game's universe. Your imagination meant everything, and we would play them for hours and hours. I feel that a lot of my inspiration for making Ryzom came from these sorts of games.