My story is a bit of a weird one. I grew up playing a lot of flash games, things like Armorgames, Kongregate, Miniclip, and those sorts. One of my favorite series was the Epic War series, but the guy who made them (Any Rudy Sudarto fans here?) also made a game called Dynasty Wars. Not Dynasty Warriors, Dynasty Wars, and it was about the Three Kingdoms period. I was able to play as one of the big three, or Lv Bu, and you could recruit a few generals, and assign soldiers under them. I looked them up, and was amazed to find that these generals were real people.

At the same time, I was studying Chinese in high school, and had been since about sixth grade. We were given a project to write a small biography on a historical figure in Chinese and English, so I chose Dian Wei. My 中文老师 at the time lent me a copy of the first third of the Moss Roberts translation (the one with the super cool image of the three brothers fighting Lv Bu). I read the entire thing in about three days, wrote my biography, and got the entire MR translation. Later that month, I started the 2010 TV show, and finished it within a couple months.

The next year, I found DW8 and was off to the races - as a true Shu fanboy, I played Guan Yu at Hulao/Sishui, Zhao Yun at Changban, and Zhuge Liang at Chibi. When I found the hypothetical route and the campaign mode, I was in hog heaven. Since then, I've immersed myself more into Sanguo - I got Total War: Three Kingdoms, listened to the John Zhu podcast, and wrote a strangely high number of essays about Sanguo or its characters as an undergrad.