craveonline

Most triumph over adversity stories are boring tales of people who learn to overcome their disabilities to do to do things most people don't care about to begin with. But imagine if you were so injured that you couldn't even play video games. Robert Florio was paralyzed in an accident at 14. Not only did he learn to play video games with his mouth, but now he has graduated from design school online and aims to develop more accessible games for the community. There's a movie of the week they should make. You can read more at his website, http://www.robertflorio.com and go deeper in this exclusive interview.

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CraveOnline: How long after your injury were you able to start playing games again?

Robert Florio: I think I started playing games again a couple years after my injury. I just started playing with the arcade joystick, Playstation 1.

CraveOnline: So not that long without a gaming fix?

Robert Florio: Maybe two or three years at the most.

CraveOnline: What were the best games at that time you were able to play?

Robert Florio: It was the golf games like Tiger Woods, the baseball games. I started playing a little bit with the first Tony Hawk game. Back then, when the Playstation first came out, the games were easier to play because you didn't need two dual controllers, two dual analog controllers to do a lot of the functions.

CraveOnline: And those sports games have a lot of pauses so you can catch up?

Robert Florio: Yes, exactly. There's a lot of lag time in between setting up and the next function. It makes it a lot easier.

CraveOnline: But Tony Hawk is a huge jump.

Robert Florio: That's one of those things where you just wish that you can play it and then you start pushing certain buttons to jump and it maxes up your ollie as high as you can so that you can make a trick.

CraveOnline: What is the plan for more accessible options in today's games?

Robert Florio: I think that the plan for today's games would be to simplify the selections and make it more user friendly, a lot smaller learning curves and make it so that it's not so complicated to make tons of selections. Simple things really make it a lot easier to do. One of the most dramatic things would be in my opinion, changing the way games are played with controllers. A big example is the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo Wii is kind of revolutionizing the way games are made. I kind of envision in the future that maybe someday I'll design a certain kind of controller that will really catch on and everyone can use and there won't be an issue anymore of accessibility because it was designed for everyone to level the playing field.