The National Voices section features commentaries and reports on PGR 4 action throughout the world. The contributors have been chosen from the most active members of the PGR community and will provide a unique voice for current and upcoming events.

Blimey. Me. Where to begin? Well, I suppose we should keep it mainly gaming for starters, and there’s no better place to start than at the beginning. As an "early-adopter" of new technology, I totally embrace  shiny new gadgetry in all its forms, but my gaming pedigree goes way, way back to 4:3 aspect ratios, tiny monochromatic displays, and tinny monophonic bleeps, when aliens invaded in line-dance formation and tennis was played with a white stick and a square ball. I got badly bitten by the gaming bug at a very early age, and, with the constant scratching it has received, the bite mark has never really had a chance to heal.

We’re talking old-school gaming here from back in the day, with the seeds of my addiction sown during many happy hours with Atari VCS, Intellivision, Colecovision, and Vectrex, and since then I must have owned every gaming format in existence. Yep, thirty years later my enjoyment of gaming is thankfully showing no signs of diminishing, and I consider it a privilege to be a gamer in the current climate, where the most exciting and innovative graphical, gameplay and control developments are happening right before our eyes. We truly live in exciting times. My teenage kicks are a dim and distant memory now, so should I, as a 39-year-old, be concerned that my gamerscore has just passed the 32k mark? Hell no! I should be proud of it. Should I be concerned about the constant ache in my thumbs? Well, possibly. It will probably go away if I ignore it.

Outside of gaming, I’m a car enthusiast with a powerful, modern car that gives me about half the enjoyment of my old, powerless, vintage MG. Thankfully it also gives me half of the headaches and half of the upkeep expense. As a lover of both videogames and cars, I’ve naturally followed Bizarre’s ground-breaking racing projects from  the pre-Gotham era, with MSR being the reason I went out and bought a Dreamcast. In turn, PGR was the reason I bought an Xbox, and yep, you’ve guessed it, PGR 3  the reason I now own a 360. PGR 4 looks like it’s going to greatly raise the bar once again,  so with no new console to purchase, I went out and bought a Microsoft steering wheel instead. Like me, it’s just twitching in anticipation of PGR 4’s release.

Vocationally, I earn my crust in the engineering and development of tensile fabric architecture, which is almost related to my  product design education, kind of validating those six years of hard partying and crippling student debts. Not all of my golf (just the better stuff) is played from the armchair while wearing Tiger’s shoes, and not all of my tennis (again, just the better stuff) is the Virtua kind. I’ve travelled extensively, and have lived in South Africa and Australia before returning to good old Blighty, where I currently reside on border patrol between Wales and England in a small town with a racecourse, a castle, and not much else.

And that, in a nutshell, is me!

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