Mark van Diggelen: SkillPod Media

Name: Mark van Diggelen

Company: SkillPod Media (Pty) Ltd

Profession: CEO / Chief Gamer

Favorite Classic Game: Larry Lounge Lizard

Quote: It was one of the 1st true strategy RPG games and kept you glued to your 286 PC for hours and hours on end, it’s a legendary game.

I have a lot of great game playing memories from the early to mid-eighties. My best friend, Jose, my brother and I were absolute arcade games addicts and used to take our R1 (roughly Us$12 in today’s money) and walk across to the corner cafe (convenience store). We had an ongoing dilemma and that is that each game cost 20c and our favorite chocolate cost 20c, but we were 3 people and each of us needed to play at least one game, of either Pacman, Asteroids or the latest and greatest release, Space Invaders. What we did was buy 2 chocolates and then share them between the 3 of us, as evenly as we could.

Thereafter it was time for action and sheer determination to achieve the highest score, we were pretty good and used to play for between 30 and 40 minutes per player. Then came the PC and the 1st RPG games, Larry Lounge Lizard, this game had me instantly addicted and turned out to be my favorite game of all time. At the time I was studying and would start playing at around 9pm, after some studying and completion of projects, and invariably only finish after 3am and still need to be up by 6am for college. Larry Lounge Lizard is a legend, even in its simple form.

Bio/Current Event: SkillPod Media is an innovative online gaming and application development business, that’s passionate about the casual gaming market. SkillPod Media  has developed a world class proprietary gaming platform, for online and mobile, which already powers a number of highly successful games sites for some of the top International and South African online portals. We’re currently launching our new platform that includes Power-ups for games, ability for users to customise their games and create and pimp their avatars.

Visits: 2021