My Game Collection
My DVD/HD/BD Collection
Hi, I’m Olly Dean. I was born on 4th October 1985 in Bournemouth, UK.
My first school report said that I was an “average student”. After going through Winton Primary School, in 1997 I was accepted to Bournemouth School, the local grammar school where I stayed until I was 18. I left with 10½ GCSEs, a Cambridge Certificate in Japanese, six AS-levels, and four A-levels.
Obviously my main interests come from the technical world. Gaming and film are where most of my time and money is spent but I’m also interested in computers, the Internet, and web design. Outside of bits and bytes, I enjoy watching football – that’s the real football. I’ve visited Japan twice, Australia once, and I’ve seen much of North America over the years. But the crux of my interests is that pretty much anything from so-called geek culture is fair game for me.
It was during my time at Bournemouth School that I got my first permanent job working at WHSmith in Bournemouth. That was supplemented by student loans, occasional small web design projects, and various bits of freelance work on magazines and websites. I’ve been in everything from games™ to IGN over the last few years.
The urge to become a games critic probably started around the end of my primary education when I really got into games and therefore games magazine. I’d played them before obviously – since I was three and my dad got me a Vectrex, which I still have – but for some reason the release of the N64 galvanised me into a gaming fiend and led to the acquisition of my current games collection and, at one point, the puchase of five games magazines a month. I haven’t really looked back since then, branching out from something of a Nintendo fanboy to play pretty much anything and even trying my hand at a couple of abortive fanzines.
NekoFever.com has been going in various forms since 2003 when I bought the domain of my long-standing online handle. I’d run the Shenmue Fan Site – as far as I know the first unofficial Shenmue site on the web when I started it in 1999 – for some time before that and it had become fairly popular, but when it became clear that the Shenmue series wasn’t going anywhere fast I started up the new site where I could talk about anything I wanted. I wrote this in HTML which I updated by hand, and when this got to be really hard work I lost enthusiasm for the idea. It wasn’t until a year or so later when the blog scene started to boom that I decided to rebuild it in a more convenient form, and in February 2005 I relaunched it as a site run on WordPress. That’s where you find me today.
I recently completed a degree in journalism at Southampton Solent University and now work for Imagine Publishing, where I’m currently sub editor on 360 and PowerStation magazines.
