I’m going to start all this off by saying that I don’t expect you to believe me. I’m not even sure you’ll understand it all but I’m not one for keeping things bottled up inside me, and if I don’t tell someone I’m going to lose my mind… so, here it goes;

My name is Lester Dunn and I think I may have broken the universe.

I’ve had 18 somewhat okay years to grow into my role as he-who-breaks-the-universe and since I’ve opened this can of worms, I might as well give you the whole nine as to how I ended up here. I’d love to say it all started with the code but it started long before that with a little game called Minecraft.

For the uninitiated; Minecraft is, on the surface, a mining simulator. Beneath that it’s a farming game, under that it’s like online Lego and below all that sits a complex engine that allows you to not only punch a tree to collect wood but use red-stone powder and a zillion torches to create a fully functional calculator. It’s what started my love for all of this and frankly, what I’m going to blame all of this on, because blaming Minecraft for my inability to socialize is easier than trying to be introspective.

Alright, in reality I doubt I’m alone in saying that I was a socially awkward, pimple-faced 12 year old nerd who enjoyed too much diet coke and probably needed to keep an eye on my hygiene situation a little better. I was far from an original and if you put me in a line with other pre-teen boys in the era of Minecraft, I doubt you’d be able to tell the difference. Within that however; within this shell of a chubby, quiet, goofy body was most definitely the brain of a creator. Whether or not the creations were any good, only time would tell (the jury’s still out actually) but Minecraft gave me a blank canvas, all the colours possible and said, “Paint it, kid.”

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At first I got really big into creative mode, using colourful blocks of wood, stone & dirt to create houses; forest, castles, underground systems and so much more. It was like I could feel the itch in my brain being scratched. It felt wonderful. I’d spend hours up in my room only to run down before dinner and drag my mom upstairs to show her the latest underwater fortress I’d built or my take on Hogwarts. My mother was a saint for pretending to care about the numerous and similarly designed buildings I’d floating in front of for her on my computer screen. In fact both of my parents, Letitia and George, were patient with me (especially in those early years) and let me really fly my creative flag.

These were fun, creative ways to scratch the creative itch I had but the real trouble started when I realized just how much you can do in the game. Suddenly the idea of making something visually pleasing but functionally useless wasn’t enough; I needed to build things that ran and used pistons and plungers to work… to move. My days of running downstairs to show mom and dad stopped and the little sunshine I did get had all but vanished by the time I completed my first working computer within the game. The world became open in a way that first day I created the rudimentary computer, open and yet… smaller in a way.

Smaller because while the things you could do within the world were infinite you were still playing by those rules. That no matter how much you wanted to create; you were still using the same blocks, the same rules and the same canvas as everyone else. The more I thought about it the more I realized that what I really wanted, what I really craved, what really excited the voice in the back of my brain wasn’t the prospect of painting on a canvas but painting on whatever surface I wanted. I wanted to create my own world, my own video game, with my own rules and my own blocks. A world defined by me, created by me and governed by me. I wanted all of this and I wanted it to feel really and truly free.

This, this first idea is what I would later and forevermore refer to as what we call “my first, big mistake.”