It feels like yesterday I was sitting in front of my dad's Atari computer, trying to load games and programs from a 2.5" floppy drive. Crazy to think that was almost 30 years ago.

I was born in 1986 in a town called Rottenmann in Styria, Austria. I grew up there and spent most of my life in that area.

I always dreamed of becoming an architect, a product designer, or a Byte Bandit. I graduated from high school and started working at an advertising agency. I fell in love with designing and programming websites – it was literally all I did. Eventually, I realized I should focus on that work exclusively, and that's how I got into all this multimedia stuff.

After a few years running my own graphic and multimedia design studio, I started studying 3D animation and web design. In July 1999, I created my first website "patric.at" with Macromedia Flash (sadly no longer online).

I actually found a full version of Flash 3 in my room mixed in with a stack of audio CDs. I had no clue what it was or who it belonged to... This was way before I even knew what Flash was, but I asked if I could have it anyway. I took it, installed it, and quickly figured out what it was. I started playing with it and made some simple animations like everyone does first... ball rolling, spinning box, etc... A few days later, a friend called and asked if I was good with Flash. I lied and said "very well". Turns out he was about to start a new company and needed a website.

At that point, I'd never even created a website before, but I decided to take the project anyway. I spent 3 months working on it unpaid, and it turned out to be terrible, of course, but the "client" was happy :-)

I had already been doing 3D animation for about a year, but being able to make interactive animations, especially 3D ones, just blew my mind.

... You know how it turned out, right? ;-)