Sabri Zain @sabrizain

I work as a communications and advocacy director for the wildlife trade monitoring network of the nature conservation organization WWF. However, when I'm not helping save the world, I'm causing massive death and destruction in computer games, as I am also an avid wargamer. As you can see from the picture of my Second Life avatar, I am also a massive Trekkie :)

The first computer game I ever played was in 1980 - a version of 'Star Trek' written by a fellow student at the Department of Civil Engineering at what was then Thames Polytechnic London. It was written in Fortran, had to be run using punch cards and teletype machines on an old DEC minicomputer and it took nearly two semesters to finish just one game. It was also not very good but it was interesting enough to encourage me to buy a 48K ZX Spectrum and opened my eyes to the world of commercial gaming. Looking at a demo of the WWI ace game in Microsoft Flight Simulator version 1 two years later convinced me that I had to cut down on non-essentials such as rent, food and drink and buy myself one of those new-fangled IBM Personal Computers. The rest, as they say, is history.

My top 10 favourite games: 1. Operation Flashpoint (WIN) 2. Silent Hunter series (DOS/WIN) 3. 1942 Pacific Air War (DOS) 4. Starfleet Command series (WIN) 5. Medieval Total War series (WIN) 6. Age of Rifles (DOS) 7. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (DOS) 8. Battlefield 2 (WIN) 9. Napoleon in Russia (WIN) 10. Freelancer (WIN)

Why do I contribute to MobyGames? Two main reasons. 1) To show all you young whipper-snappers out there why games in the good ol' days of the early 1990s are, in terms of gameplay, miles ahead of the finished-in-one-day eye-candy games of today; 2) it gives me a good excuse to power-up the DOSBox and dust off and play games I hadn't touched in over 15 years!