Features - Thursday, February 18, 2010 13:09 - 0 Comments

Achala Mataraaratchi: Australian competitive gamer

When Achala Mataraaratchi first started playing computer games, the technology behind them wasn’t very advanced. “Probably the first game I ever played was Commander Keen — the original DOS game,” he says in a recent interview.

Commander Keen was released in the early 1990s by then-nascent developer id Software, which would go on to dominate the globe with its Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises. According to the extensive Wikipedia history of the game, it was notable for its use of EGA graphics — a new format which allowed computers to display 16 simultaneous colours on a screen with a resolution of up to 640×350 pixels.

But that was enough for Mataraaratchi (known online by his handle, ‘Spachala’). “I really enjoyed it … I think I was like four years old.”

These days the Sydney-based university computer science student is playing games with a little more complexity to them. And his childhood wonder at computer games has turned into a more serious hobby — Mataraaratchi is a well-known competitive gamer in the Australian scene and with his team-mates has taken out several major titles.

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