My name is Jonathan Valero I was born and raised here in Brooklyn. Growing up my family was pretty poor so me and my siblings didn’t have very many toys or anything like that. All our parents could afford was the bare necessities but occasionally my dad would find some spare money to get us something special for the holidays. One of these special gifts was the PlayStation 2 back in 2001. This was actually my third Games console. My previous ones were a Sega Genesis and a Sega Dreamcast, but I didn’t spend as much time with either of those like I did with my PlayStation 2. Many of my afternoons were spent playing some of the PlayStation 2 hits of the time: Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Kingdom Hearts 2 etc. I was a big fan of all these games because they had very colorful characters and environments, I didn’t know anything about game art or design, but I did know about aesthetic and everything I played was appealing to it. These games were also a strong counter to the boring and drab school life as a kid I didn’t really have a goal in mind for the future my daily cycle went something like this. Wake up, go to school, do homework and finally play the PlayStation. This is the cycle that I followed for most of my childhood but at the same time my teachers were trying to make us take initiative as we were moving on from elementary school to middle school. I thought to myself “If I’m spending all my time playing video games anyway I should do something related to that”. My first idea was to just become a professional gamer, but my parents quickly shot that idea down. So, I decided to pursue games with the aspect that appealed to me the most and that was the art and design of video games. So, I spent a lot of the time when I wasn’t in school or playing games trying to teach myself as much as I can about the game industry and following major game designers. This also led into my interest in animation and the arts.