My name is Jay Barrett Bowers II and I was the first born to Jay and Eloise Bowers, a military family in Raleigh North Carolina. Many events have defined my life but none more than the ones tied to video games.

        My first video game was the Super Mario Bros. Duck hunt combo game on the original NES. Mario was originally my favorite game at the time, but my parents later bought a SEGA Genesis and the first Sonic the Hedgehog game and it quickly stole the spot in my heart. The fast-paced side scrolling action pulled me in more than the tubby little plumber did. Back when sonic three came out is when I got really into the series, and sonic and knuckles after that really sealed the deal for me. When Sonic 3 came out McDonalds had a contest to win a copy and I sent one for almost everyone I knew. It ended up that the entry I sent in with my brother's name had won and we fought over who would keep it. I have no idea who really won the claim to it but I am the one that still has it. The Sonic series has fallen off a bit on consoles since Sonic Adventure 2 but I am still a loyal fan.

        In third grade, I moved from Berlin, Germany to a small city in Texas named Killeen. Over the next few years, I would meet my best friends Anthony M. Marquez, and Xavier D. Saulter. They enjoyed video game as much as I did and we would get together to play whenever we could. I started drawing in fourth or fifth grade. Back then, I would just make Sonic-esque characters and name them after friends I met. Sometime around middle school, I started up drawing more human characters than anthropomorphic and I created some Simpsons-esque characters.

        One great thing that happened during my middle school days was the real mainstream introduction of 3D titles. When the Nintendo 64 and Mario were released out, I was lucky enough to get them for Christmas. Sadly, with the introduction of 3D games came an odd motion sickness... It really took me a while to get used to, but it was the first times a video game ever made me feel ill. I first got it while playing a demo in Toys R us... I have long since got over the motion sickness but I remember loving and hating this transitional period in games. The days of playing games like Mario 64, Jumping Flash and Crash Bandicoot will dwell in my mind as some of the best and most painful times. The Turok game was the main offender, up until then I cannot remember ever playing a shooter aside from Doom, which I could not get into. I still could not get into shooters but that would later change with Turok: Rage Wars and Unreal II. Shooters would later become one of my top three genres.

        Around Thanksgiving in 1997, I saw commercials for Final Fantasy VII. Honestly, at that time, I had no idea it was an RPG, all I knew was that RPGs were usually top down view and at the time I could not stand them. The only video games I played up until then had all been fighting games, racers, and platformers. Up till this point I had only ever got whatever games my parents bought for me, I was finally getting to point I was allowed to choose for myself. However, for some reason, the commercials swayed me and I got my parents go and rent it for me. I am seriously glad they did that because it quickly became my favorite game of the time. I played the whole thanksgiving break with nearly no breaks, I seriously ate like one meal a day. I was crazy happy when I got the game later for Christmas that year. That game changed the way I saw RPGs. They are now one of my top three genres.

        Sometime in high school, I had finally decided that video games were my future. This was around the time of the Pokémon craze sweeping the nation, and my introduction to Metal Gear Solid. Now, up until then I had refused to get a Game boy. I had a Game gear and I would never give it up. The Game Boy's screen was just unbearable to me, but at that time Nintendo had FINALLY introduced a color version with much sharper graphics and it became tolerable. I still did not really want one because you needed light to play it, but my brother and I got one and both got a version of Pokémon. Seems somewhat sad of me to say it now but we played that game to death. It was the first top down game I had ever actually played and enjoyed. Now, Metal Gear solid was when games got serious for me. It was as if I was playing a movie. It was so engaging that my parents actually watched me play for once. Up until then they had never really been interested at all. Games were changing and that really made it apparent for me. Super Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros., Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Power Stone 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved soon made games more of a social outing than ever before. Until these games came out I never really played anything with more than two players, but these games changed everything I knew about multiplayer games. LAN parties became the norm Anthony's house because he was a short walk from the school. We would go during school lunch and after school and play a bunch of games. His mom would sometimes come back early from work and catch around eight kids playing        games in the living room and quickly kick us all out. My friends and I pretty much came up with Team Swat in halo and introduced it using tunneling services like Xbox Connect to play against teams online, the name of the game is different from what we called it, but we are all sure that we did it first! The lag was unbearable but that all changed when Halo: PC came out which became my favorite one in the series.

        During my time in high school I was exposed to many new things, most notably Anime. This exposure accelerated later in college. Anime began to influence my art style. I have never really enjoyed doing traditional art. Everything I drew was inspired from American Cartoons. Nevertheless, anime changed my ideas on animation and cartoons. I began to make much more human characters with real life problems and personalities. My characters changed from kooky and crazy to having detailed stories behind them and they received some depth. This was also when I was first introduced to Adobe Photoshop. My skill still was not quite up there, and I never really had a favorite artist until this time. I still don't have any single favorite to this day but I do have names of people I can point you to that are "Great" in my opinion, one that I discovered at the time was J. Axer (name similarity to this site and my own handle is pure coincidence as this site is named after my friends and I). Being an artist that also grew up drawing anthropomorphic characters, this person really struck a chord with me. Now... people who draw anime usually have a bad stigma that has surrounded them. Anime has been considered a fad and I can agree to a point. However, having been influenced myself, I cannot put anyone down if they choose to become devoted to the styles. I do not really believe my style is 100% anime, I can say I have a good enough mixture of both American animation and Japanese anime styles to stand out.

        During high school, I had realized my goal for life I wanted to make games. So, I applied to many places, but soon realized that it was going to be expensive since every school that had classes in the subject were out of state. So I decided that I would go to a community college and get the basic classes out of the way and transfer credits and get the real meat of what I wanted to do out of state. Around this time the Game Boy Advanced SP came out, its main feature a backlight! This was the first time I had ever wanted a Game Boy. I was lucky enough to have found a best buy selling the system about a week early. Up until this time, I had never had a computer.

        I knew that I would be glued to a computer almost 24/7 if I were going to be a game designer. So my parents and I talked it out and I was allowed to get a computer. After discovering that none of the computers on sale in my town had what I wanted under the hood except for the $2000 Alienware computers on sale at best buy, it became apparent that I would have to have it built to get anything good for the money I was given. After researching places around town to have one built, I concluded that I should just do it myself. So I got on the computers at school and researched parts and pieces and picked everything I needed. I ordered them all and put it together myself. This gave rise to my current love of computers. I have built many computers free of charge to friends and friends of friends. I genuinely enjoy putting them together and having them work. During this time I decided to try my hand at an MMO, I chose Final Fantasy XI since I had played all of them since VII and felt Square had not done me wrong before. Safe to say, I became hooked, and still am to this day. I vowed never to play another MMO ever due to how much you can become hooked on them, so I never played World of Warcraft. However, they recently announced FFXIV as an MMO and now I have been contemplating breaking that vow...

        When I finally finished getting my basic classes out of the way, I had decided that I wanted to go to the Art Institute of California in San Francisco. They were one of the few colleges at the time that offered game design, most other courses other schools at the time only really offered game programming, which was not what I wanted at all. My mother had decided on her own that she wanted to pay for my way through college as much as she could, so she elected to go overseas to Iraq and perform a civilian job. None of us really wanted her to do this but none of us could really stop her. I was against it but in the end, it was her decision. Thanks to her, I did not have to get a job and was able to focus 100% on my course work. She has since returned safely and without a scratch thank heavens. While in college, I discovered that almost every artist older than me hated Anime styles, lucky my style was different enough that no one accused me of being too much of an Anime fan boy. I found that Animation professors embraced Anime more than game professors. College was also my introduction to other games I fell in love with that I probably would not have touched beforehand. Since all of the professors also played and made games, they would bring in examples of games they thought were good and ones that were... not so good. During this time, I became enthralled with the Jak and Daxter series, Ratchet and clank, Sly Cooper, Shadow of the Colossus and many other great games.

        The course work was hard but I was finally able to finish and graduate with a Bachelors of Science in Game Art and Design. Now is the time of the job search... and that is where this story ends. I hope it goes well and you see my name in some credits sometime soon!