Attila Olbrich.

Growing up in Budapest during the 1980s, I was a child at the dawn of the personal computer age in Hungary. Back then, computers were a distant dream for most, and I had no clear idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Whenever someone asked, I’d simply say, “An entrepreneur with a lot of money.” It wasn’t specific, but my father, a brilliant and inquisitive man, wasn’t about to let me stay vague. He wanted to find out what sparked my curiosity and would often bring home books on photography, electronics, languages—anything to spark a passion.

One day, after school, I found a book on my desk titled Programming in Basic. Intrigued, I opened it up and found myself unable to put it down. The catch? We didn’t have a computer at home. This was Hungary in the '80s, behind the Iron Curtain, where personal computers weren’t something you could just walk into a store and buy. But that didn’t stop me. I began writing Basic code on paper, executing it in my head, debugging and refactoring the programs mentally.

My father soon realized that I was genuinely interested in this new world. A friend of his, who lived nearby, owned a Sinclair ZX-81 computer with a 16KB RAM extension. They generously lent it to us, and that’s when I began creating simple black-and-white games in Basic. I was hooked, not just by playing the games but by the creative process behind making them.

Unfortunately, the ZX-81 wasn’t ours to keep. I was devastated when it had to be returned, but my father had a plan. In 1982, computers weren’t easy to come by in Hungary, but there was a way—smuggling from Austria. One of my father’s colleagues had a ZX Spectrum, an incredible machine at the time, and he didn’t know what to do with it. My dad made a deal: he traded in our new, expensive color television set for the ZX Spectrum, and just like that, we had our own computer.

I was captivated. The games were amazing, but it wasn’t long before I became more interested in creating them than playing. I quickly outgrew Basic and wanted more speed, more control. That’s when I turned to machine code and assembly language. Writing games in assembly was a challenge, but seeing them run at lightning speed—especially on such limited hardware—was exhilarating.

It was during this time that I learned the art of optimization: making code as fast and small as possible, especially since image data had to be compacted into limited memory. This skill, though honed on old hardware with constraints, continues to shape my approach today, even though modern technology doesn’t always demand such strict optimization. It’s a foundation that has stayed with me, even as the world of computing has evolved.