A lot of us have grown up around video games. Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Doom, Quake, Sonic the Hedgehog, Call of Duty … and then came mobile games, online games, Microsoft’s X-box and X-box 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii.

With the ever-growing advanced games and systems, the video game industry has become a superpower with an estimated $40 billion in revenues in 2007. The growth is not expected to wane.

Sophomore Thomas Griebel started drawing and designing code during school.

Sophomore Thomas Griebel, a computer-science major, says he’s been “doodling” ever since he was in first grade. Over the years, he also was playing a lot of video games, complementing his hobby of drawing and sketching. By high school, he had taken some art classes and was starting to get involved in digital art.

Griebel said he was inspired by the imagination and interactivity of Super Mario Bros. at a very young age. Nowadays, he owns more than 200 games. One weekend during high school, an idea popped in his mind. Sitting with his cousin, Griebel pondered the idea of creating his own video game.

“I learned how to code when I started the project,” he said.

His first project Black Epoch didn’t work very well in the beginning stages, he made a lot of enhancements after spending a year learning about art and design and becoming more familiar with the codes involved.

He said his sister was his inspiration, especially in regards to building different levels into the game and incorporating a mixture of designs.

“My sister did a master’s in animation from the University of Southern California and currently works at Sony,” Griebel said.

What his friends saw at the end of October 2009 was Demo of Black Epoch: Vengeance, a game in which one a player tries to stop a coup de force and prevent the malevolent forces and a dark age.

A still from the first level of Black Epoch: Vengeance- Daemoneus.

Griebel says, “Black Epoch: Vengeance is inspired by Contra video game series and has been an 18-month project. The game can be found on the web on a Facebook group named Black Epoch: Vengeance.

“I set out to create on the best-looking flash games on the web,” Griebel said. “You can judge for yourselves.”

Griebel plans to publish the game online for now, but he hopes to, eventually, work with a game-developing company. The video game industry is not just imaginative; it’s hard work and dedication with neck-breaking competition, he said. But with a lot of platforms around, he thinks he’ll have a chance to showcase his skills.

“Trust me, there’s a lot of code involved; code runs the art,” Griebel says with a smile.

Click here to play the game.