Biography
Shane R. Monroe
Shane has been video gaming in one fashion or another for nearly 30 years.
It started with a love affair with the Parker Bros. MERLIN in 1978 - a futuristic phone looking electronic game that played 6 whopping games. By 11, he was playing games on the TSR-80 Model III computer then moved through the entire line of Commodore computers (Vic-20 to Amiga), finally making the leap to PC gaming in 1995.
Before he could afford a Commodore 64, he would sit at Sears in the Mall, programming and demonstrating the C64 machines there. In 1985, Shane saw his first Amiga playing Defender of the Crown and knew he'd fallen in love with gaming all over again. In 1988, he got his first Amiga 500 and spent the next 7 years of his live as an Amiga gamer, advocate, and game programmer.
In the late 1990s, Shane became involved with classic video game emulation with the amazing JROK remakes, Sparcade, and of course MAME and went went on to run some of the most successful classic gaming/emulation websites in the world (Insert Coin, Amiga Emulation Zone). He started the Retro Radio (now RetroGaming Radio) show in 1998 and still runs it today.
Along the way, Shane did plenty of time on consoles. His cousins had a loaded Atari 2600 and many a weekend were spent playing Pitfall, Cosmic Ark and Adventure. One of his best friends soon got a Colecovision and marathon madness playing Venture, Ladybug, and Donkey Kong soon ensued. In the Navy, Shane went through a Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Nintendo Gameboy, Atari Lynx, and finally ended up with a Playstation and Dreamcast. While Shane believes the Dreamcast was the last console with a "soul", he was sucked into gaming again with the Playstation 2 (Norrath, God of War, Burnout) and the Gamecube (Resident Evil 4, Pacman vs., Super Monkey Ball).
Once the GBA SP came out, he rejoined the handheld gaming field and began to realize that handheld gaming was fastly becoming the most important market in the industry and his predictions came to fruition with the release of the Nintendo DS where a whole new market of innovation was possible. He started Dual Screen Radio with Chris Hentschel in 2005.
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