0Way back when Mario was still a mere twinkling in Miyamoto's eye, I was the proud owner of a state-of-the-art Commodore 64 microcomputer. It came with a game development s- tem called "The Quill," which allowed anyone to create their own text-based adventure games. It may have been incredibly crude, but it suddenly put at my fingertips the thrill of enterta- ing my nearest and dearest by devising "interactive challenges" of my own. Unfortunately, I knew little about game design, and rather than easing my players into a new and alien world, I treated them as opponents that had to be defeated before they could reach the end. Their sp- its crushed, they left, never to return . . . It took me years of playing a variety of good (and bad) games to eventually learn how to treat the player to the game-playing experience that their investment of time and money deserved. It took just hours of reading this book to wish I'd had its invaluable guidelines and the accompanying Game Maker tool to help me take my own first steps into game devel- ment all those years ago.