My Father the Hero

Adam Rippon, creator of Dragon Fantasy, discusses how the game is a tribute to his late father, his best friend, who planted the seed for his love of games at an early age. 

My Dad, Tom Rippon, bought me my first video game, Tooth Invaders for the Commodore Vic-20, when I was very young. Last year, two years into his losing battle with lung cancer, I found a copy of it at a local vintage game shop and repaid the favor. I gave him Tooth Invaders as an early Christmas present, because I just couldn’t wait. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know at the time was that the cancer had spread to Dad’s brain, and within a few weeks he would be gone.

Dad didn’t know when he bought that game for me that it would shape my entire life. As a child he knew I was very interested in games, and he watched as I learned to program. In high school I spent most of my time working on a homebrew RPG, “Project Talisman”, and somewhat neglected my studies. It had a cast of eight main characters, one of whom was based on my Dad. Eventually, I used the demo of the game as a resume, and when I was nineteen I dropped out of college and moved to California to make video games professionally.

Dad himself hadn’t been super into video games until that point. Sure, he enjoyed playing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on the Commodore 64 with me when I was a kid, and he had been pretty good at F-Zero, but that was about it. That all changed one day when he came to visit me in California. I was at work, of course (turns out in the video game business you kind of work a lot), so dear old Dad was bored. He picked up The Legend of Zelda, Link’s Awakening for Gameboy, and within an hour I got a call at work from him, asking how to find his way out of the Lost Woods.

After that, Dad was hooked. He played every Zelda game, beating most of them save for Zelda 2, which he just couldn’t get into. Go figure. One year, I came home for Christmas and he branched out - we played through the fan translation of Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3 for the purists out there) and beat the entire game together. That was the single best gaming experience of my life. Dad may not have had the reflexes I did, but he held his own quite well and it was the icing on the cake for one of the best Christmases of my life.

In 2005, Dad got sick with a benign pituitary gland tumor, presumably caused by inhaling the glazes he used in his ceramics. After that, he always seemed fine, but his immune system was very impaired and he got sick all the time. Finally, he was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer in 2008. He died 25 months later, on December 2nd, 2010. His death shook my whole family, and I was devastated to lose my best pal.

In 2011, on April 1st, Dad’s birthday, I started on a new project. I resurrected Project Talisman, cut the other 7 characters, and focused on the character based on Dad, Ogden Thomas. I sent Dad’s faux 8-bit avatar into a world filled with silly monsters, villains and heroes. He went on a journey to find legendary equipment and defeat demonic evils, and he did it with a smile on his face. The game, now called Dragon Fantasy, came out in August, and it got some great reviews. But most importantly, it helped me deal with the loss of my Dad in a way that nothing else could. I know that he’s gone and I’ll never have him back, and it pains me that I can’t share the success of the game with him. But from now on, the rest of the world will see him like I do - a mighty hero, out on a new adventure.

  1. tochiro reblogged this from gamessavedmylife
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  4. japanesesubtitles reblogged this from bampowsmash and added:
    this is so sweet. what a great blog. i’m gana start reading all of these. and then i’ll work in the video game industry....
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  6. bampowsmash reblogged this from gamessavedmylife and added:
    word. http://gamessavedmylife.com/
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