I'm Scott, Founder and CEO of Heeroic Studios Gaming, LLC. I’ve been doing Tabletop RPGs since 2002, but I was exposed to D&D by my father when I was a child (no idea what I was looking at), Choose-Your-Own-Adventures (including the solo adventure works of Joe Dever), Magic: The Gathering when I was 11/12 years old, and wargaming in the early months of 2000. My first TTRPG was Shadowrun and I played a whole campaign as a pink mohawk Troll biker. My freshman year of college in 2003 hooked me in deeper with a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP and that was it. RPGs were my hobby.
I GM’ed my first game in late-2002/early-2003 (memory is a bit faulty), but after that, it became the common for me to take the GM hat if there was a new game I wanted to try with my friends. That led me to fall into the “Always a GM, rarely a player” category, which meant a whole lot of worldbuilding. That led to THIS: the creation of my own RPG company.
My first game design project was actually a western-style D&D 3.5 derivative when I was still in high school. However, we didn't know about the existence of Deadlands at the time, not until much, much later. The second attempt was my first "Real" attempt was Maximum Apocalypse RPG with Rock Manor Games, and that was all she wrote.