tim rogers is a sporadic contributor to Kotaku, writing a "monthly" "column" about no real subject in particular. He has written a column in Britain's gamesTM magazine for over five years, and has written in the past for Edge Online. He is also the editor-in-chief, founder, and ruthless dictator of underground non-profit hyper-critical video game review blog Action Button Dot Net (NASDAQ: ABDN), located at the following web address: ActionButton.Net.
He graduated from Indiana University with, among other things, a Certificate of Journalism and a bachelor's degree in Chinese linguistic studies, at the age of nineteen. He had also studied Russian and many Arabic languages (Farsi, in particular) with hopes of joining the CIA as a field agent. He was indeed scouted by the CIA, who told him he could have a job when he was old enough to legally purchase alcohol. In the next two years, he founded a small business the nature of which is far too boring to mention on such a fun website, and has never needed money — much less a job, for that matter — since.
He relocated from Indiana to Las Vegas to California to Europe, and eventually Tokyo, where, out of morbid curiosity, he found a job in the video game industry. He has worked nonchalantly in marketing, PR, and game design in the industry since 2002, leaving companies when he starts to get bored. Frustrated very often by the IQs of people in positions of power, he began troll-blogging about his experience in the industry by using a too-complex metaphor of homelessness. This would be his start in "videogame journalism".
His five-year plan:
1. To publish a novel (a thinly-veiled autobiography of what it's like growing up Totally Awesome in the Information Age), tentatively titled "the pistol points at mount everest".
2. To push further forward with his minimalist rock band Large Prime Numbers, in which he plays guitar and screams. They have recently started putting together songs that are not always 100% incoherent, and a devout (small) fan base (of extremely hip, fashionable, male Japanese twenty-somethings) has started to develop. In 2009, they played at the Biggest Party in Tokyo, have a dozen shows booked for the summer, and are slated to record an album (titled "a shotgun reads the phone book") with Nirvana and Pixies sound engineer Steve Albini in Chicago before the end of the year. They will then hand the album out for free to anyone paying to attend one of their live performances, so long as the recipient agrees to have his or her picture taken and sign his or her name in a logbook so as to prevent anyone from receiving multiple copies.
3. To obtain a PhD in economics.
4. To finally accept a six-figure-salary job and become an Actual Millionaire.
Meanwhile, his hobbies include regularly humoring modeling agency scouts and appearing in catalogs for everything from eyeglasses to tea kettles. Since moving to Japan, he has only paid for three haircuts (the rest have been free, though would have been Very Expensive if they hadn't been free). He collects vintage Japanese electric guitars, has completed marathons in the past, and is currently twenty pounds into a plan to gain 60 pounds of muscle. He is a vegetarian because he dislikes the flavor of animals, not because he appreciates their personalities.
His taste in video games is best summarized by this roughly novel-length article on Action Button Dot Net.
In case you lack the will to scroll to the bottom of that page, or get thrown off by the 300-something comments, his favorite games include Street Fighter III, Gears of War, Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Mother 3, Half-Life 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, not Metal Gear Solid 4, and (most importantly) Out of this World.
The author of this post can be contacted at tips@kotaku.com











