My name is Wilfredo Laboy Jr. But I go by OnePromise. I will explain what that name means to me later down the page. I was born April 19th 1987. I am an advent gamer and I am very competitive. I currently live in Queens. Not only am I a gamer but I am also an obstacle course runner, writer, and a video game developer. Yes I know that is a very strange combination of traits and hobbies. However, I find it fits perfectly. For those of you who know me, know I am extremely active plus my imagination is pretty wild. But here are just some of the aspects of my life.
What does OnePromise mean
Now many people have always asked me what OnePromise means. And I always say, it’s a long story but it’s not a long story just an emotional one for me. Now for those of you who know me, you know that I was given the tag name Macho. My mom gave me that name because after I survived my surgery when I was 9 months old she said “I was her little Macho Man”. Now I am not sure how true that is, or if she was hoping that I would become big and strong if that’s the case the big part kind of failed haha. But anyways as I got older I wasn’t really a fan of the name because I felt self-conscious about my medical condition and being limited from competitive sports definitely didn’t make me feel very “Macho”.
Once online gaming became a thing I jumped to various names, Wolf, Lone Wolf, ButterBiscuit (Don’t Judge me), to Decibel. Then one day we moved to a new apartment in Canarsie, Brooklyn. There I met this guy named Dee and his wife Tee, they were an older couple but always full of life. Now Dee was a gamer, not on my level of competitiveness but nonetheless he was a gamer. He was a very cool guy and I looked up to him as an uncle, since me and my uncles didn’t really have a bond, nor did I really have a father figure in my life. So we use to hang out and talk about Video Games. But Dee had street credit, he was an old timer who was actually a five percenter. Now I don’t want to get into the whole ideology of that belief but it was brought along with the black panthers and such. It was a very interesting perspective on life. When it came to that belief people inherited different names that they used to call each other. Some examples are Knowledge, Truth, Sky ,and Star. Now Dee’s name was Promise. And I found it fascinating. I started using that name online and it felt right, even though I didn’t believe in their ideology the significance of the name and what it represented to me felt right.
Let’s fast forward a couple of years to the part of the story that sucks. Comes to find out that Dee had cancer in his stomach. And there was a chance that surgery would remove it all. So he went for surgery had it removed and he seemed fine. But that didn’t last, eventually it came back and it spread throughout his body, eventually it ended his life. Now I hold on to many memories but some of my most powerful memories are little things he told me “ You have to do what you have to do, because at the end of the day nobody cares for you the way you care for you”, “Always stay true to you, because who else are you going to be?” And that’s when it hit me. He was a very inspiring and always pushed people to be “Better than yesterday” And then it clicked in my head “Better than yesterday” That’s it, that is the one promise I will make to myself. And that’s when OnePromise was born!
The Gamer
I have been gaming since I have been in diapers with my first home console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I remember spending countless hours playing Mario bros. and seeing how fast I could beat the game without dying, and then being introduced to Mario 3 , legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy… I was in love! Then getting the Sega Genesis and the super Nintendo and being hooked on Sonic, altered beast, Donkey Kong and Kirby. I spent countless hours of my life understanding the games and beating them with faster and faster times. The N64 and PlayStation was next in my life and holy crap 3d games! Wrapping my head around that concept was mind boggling with star fox, Mario 64, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, and Final Fantasy VII. But it didn’t end there the consoles and the gaming industry got better from Dreamcast to PlayStation 2. Now growing up the way I did, I had to be very selective with which games I got because those games I would be playing for a very long time due to money. But I made the best of it. But I think my life changed as a gamer during the Era of the Xbox and xbox live. I am not sure how many of you guys actually remember that Era. That is when the online gaming exploded, and you weren’t just playing against your friends on your couch and your reigned supreme thinking you were the best. Now the competition got even harder.
The Xbox revolutionized gaming and didn’t take it another step with graphics and game-play, it took a giant leap and built an online community that the other consoles might have tried but didn’t succeed as the Xbox did with Xbox live. One of my favorite games to this day has been and will always be the Halo Franchise. I have spent countless hours playing online, fine tuning my skills and getting better during my early college years and slightly after that playing Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo Reach. I competed online, won a few tournaments, and met some amazing people along the way. Currently I still play my Xbox here and there but I found a new love in MMORPGS and PC games where the community is pretty vast and in my opinion more fun. I am currently into World of Warcraft and OverWatch. I play with friends which to me is huge. You will definitely see game footage of both on this site!
The Spartan in me
Some of you may know I have competed and raced in these races known as Spartan races. Many of you may not know this but I was overweight and me and a close friend (who is now one of my best friends) Danny decided that we both needed a lifestyle change. Both being hardcore gamers we decided to start working out. And we started small with walking a lot more and hitting the treadmill at the gym and changing our diet, cutting out Soda and Fast food. We eventually became better, more endurance and we could physically see the difference. Then one day, I get a call from Danny and he mentions this new thing called a Spartan Race. I was like sure why not, we can easily handle 4 miles with a few obstacles. Let me tell you that day changed my life. Not only was it one of the hottest days that year but most of the running was in open fields, so no shade from trees or anything of the sort. It took us almost 2 hours to finish the race which should have been reduced by half. But the injuries we acquired while participating in this race where markers that we had a lot to work on. We had so much to work and improve on. But little did I know when crossing that finish line the world opened up to me, and I wanted more. So we trained for the following year wanting to 3 races and get our trifecta. And that we did, conquering the Sprint in less than an hour at Citi field and the Super in Jersey. Then was the final challenge, the Beast in Killington, Vermont. This was and to this day is still the hardest Beast. 18.1 Miles, talk about being out your comfort zone. I remember hitting the 10 Mile Mark and wondering what the Hell I was doing, I wanted to quit and be like Eff this. But I didn’t I kept pushing on, body sore, and tired but I kept pushing, and we did it. One of the best achievements in my life and definitely the hardest physical challenge I had to overcome. Thinking about a possible double trifecta in 2017! Lets see if that happens.
The Writer in me
Writing is something I have always enjoyed. It's always been a way for me to express myself and pour out the crazy images, ideas and stories I have in my head. Like many of you I have these wild images/fantasies in my head of wanting to be more than just normal. Wanting to be special in the sense of going on these grand adventures and living in the shoes and eyes of made up characters. So I do that in my writing. I have all these dreams and stories in my head that I wonder and day dream about. So why not share it with the world. This also got me into development which I will talk about below.
I also write poetry, not as often as I use to but it still comes to me here and there. Now the poetry aspect is not something I can just sit down and do anymore, now its something that just comes to me. It gets stuck in my head and I can’t get it out. I need to write it down for it to actually disperse and be removed from the brain. If not it will stay there and annoy me until it is released. When I was younger, poetry was something that never left my side, it was something that I really enjoyed doing but as I got older it became something harder and harder to do only coming to me when it wanted to. But when it does come knocking I will always try and push the words that come my way.
If at first you don’t succeed call it Version 1
The developer in me is something new. This comes from both my love of Gaming and my love of writing. I decided why not put these things both together and make something amazing out of it. That’s when I got into Front End web Development at General Assembly. I wanted to share my stories with the world. I wanted people to share my world and enjoy these stories that tend to go on for days end in my head. So I took courses on html, css and JavaScript. Which at the time was amazing but I felt very limited, I wanted something else, something more. That is when I started looking into C#. JavaScript was fun but something was missing. So I started learning and building with C# and unity, which is a very amazing gaming engine and behold! I was able to work on my first game, with many others to come when time permits me to work on them. That’s when I came up with the idea of Over The Edge (OTE), a company that I would invest time into to build Video games. I took my story telling and used my development skills I learned and came up with concepts for video games that I feel people will enjoy. This is still under development as certain kinks are worked on but this is long but forgotten.
© 2018