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WHO IS GRIFFIN BISHOP?

me

I'm a guy whos always been interested in the things others seem to find really boring. Not sure why, probably something in my head bolted on incorrectly. But regardless of that, I'm more than happy to express my passion about them.

I was always kind of the weird kid growing up. I didn't really mind it, but it still kinda ate away at my own personality and probably my own development. As a kid I would always get home, jump onto my dad's computer (which still has better specs than my own one lol), and watch YouTube videos on stuff like the New York Subway, Moscow Metro, Rome Metro, Cityrail as it was known back then and of course, a lot of Thomas and Friends. I didn't really watch the TV ever, I was always either glued to a PC or lost in my eclectic collection of wooden railway toys, my parent's bank account is still hurting from some of those purchases. I always loved wooden trains in particular. Something about the scale they were, the sound of them trundling down the line, the feel of what was a genuine piece of craftsmanship and of course how easy it used to be to get them. The magnets and bogies too were fun to play with, you could feel a true sense of weight and physics in action when pulling a long rake of cars with your hand. And my god, the variety back in the day was incredible!

Back in the glory days of Toys R Us and what we thought was the 'dark era' of Thomas under the reign of Sharon Miller, you used to find shelves stocked with trains, trains and more trains. They had ones you could see in real life too, whether Imaginarium got the liscencing for them I'll never know, but there's a reason I have three GNER High-Speed-Trains still in my old bedroom. The "toy room" as it was known was my own little paradise, I had all sorts of mismatched bits of track made up in different layouts and shapes, usually one or two per year.

The real gold however was the overseas models, mostly from America. Munipals was a novel concept at this time, I was over the moon seeing the subway cars I'd seen on the computer screen now in my hand. The first one I ever got was an R46 G train (G for Griffin, obviously) and I drove that thing around almost every day. It was fantastic. From there, the collection just expanded further and further. Whittle Shortline was another fantastic brand, even if their unwieldly big locomotives struggled on some of my track pieces.

As a kid I also had a YouTube channel that my dad made for me when I said "I wanna be a YouTuber who drives trains when I grow up!", the videos I made back then may have been cringeworthy but they sure were fun to do. I don't know what I was smoking when making my first edited videos; I was editing on Filmora, a software that crashed after 7 minutes and no one else had heard of, I would get my photos from either NSWrail.net or Wikipedia with zero credit, and I would do my voice overs with a Fraps recording of the Hearts of Iron 4 launcher, the pirated version of course, so that I could push it to the side of my screen and read the script, which I had typed out into notepad, meaning I could barely read what I was saying cause it was too small. Someone explain to me how I ended up with a thousand people watching this garbage?

When I wasn't making videos about trains or playing with toy trains, I was playing video games about trains. I have a social life, I swear. I've tried my hand at many different railway video games but the two that stuck out to me the most were Trainz and Chris Sawyer's Locomotion. The former I discovered back in the days when Trainz Driver was still a thing you could download lol. The day that I got Trainz 12 was another magical one, I have spent WAY too much of my life playing that game, I've come to memorise almost all of the Australian routes, locomotives, carriages, sessions, everything that was available. I also had a strong connection for the original content made for the game back when it first released back in 2001, hence making a massive video on all of the hidden bits and bobs from back then. Most of my joy came from creating routes or reskins of different assets, I didnt have much time nor motivation to draw or create much outside of just train photos or school, so I found my artistic gateway in making mods. Its still quite a therapeutic process for myself today, especially when it involves a lot of problem solving.

Locomotion was another keystone to my childhood. I remember discovering it in 2015 and falling in love straight away. It was the best parts of Transport Tycoon mixed with the best parts of Transport Fever, it had all the mods I could ever wish for, it was easy to do whatever I wanted and most of all, it felt like you had achieved something by the end of it. I've always been a sucker for isometric and tycoon games. Just zoming out and marvelling at your massive transport system that you've crafted out of way too many brick bridges by the end of it, spotting the ever-prescent signaling failure you have to then rectify and then breathing a massive sigh of relief that you have conquered the map. I think this would have been where my love for urban planning came about for the first time, now that I think about it.

Outside of trains, my main interests and hobbies involved writing (as you might tell I've lost this passion), art, woodworking, photography, historical research and of course like any young boy, tanks, battleships and warfare. I had a massive collection of cheap $2 toy soldiers and tanks, fortifications, artillery etc that I'd bring to school so at lunch time I could bring them all out with my mates who had brought theirs and have mock tank battles on the "Big Rock" (if you know, you know). Then we'd get home and I'd usually bring someone over to play World of Warships, World of Tanks or of course, Men of War Assault Squad 2 to either 1v1 or co-op battle using me and my dad's computer. Good memories. I played a match for the first time in ages with my mate Karl as seen here. I used to be a pretty big sonic fan too, I found the old Archie comics quite fun to collect and bought the IDW comics just as they released. I didn't really play much of the games outside of the classic series and halfway through Mania. I should really finish that game, it turns a decade old next year...

Another game I discovered relatively later on was OneShot. Awesome game, awesome devs, awesome message, awesome ending that WILL make you cry. I highly reccomend that you play it.